Go back

Holocaust research infrastructure looks to the future

International consortium planning permanent research facility amid ‘rising antisemitism’

The European Holocaust Research Infrastructure has provided details of its plans to establish a permanent European facility for Holocaust studies.

EHRI described the plans on 27 January, which marked the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau network of concentration camps in Poland—where more than a million Jewish people and other minorities were killed by the Nazis in the 1940s.

Fifteen research institutions from across Europe, Israel and the United States are collaborating on the facility, with funding from the EU’s Horizon 2020 R&D programme.

“EHRI will transform itself from a project into a permanent, independent organisation that will secure the future of Holocaust research, commemoration and education,” the project said in a press release.

“At a time when survivors of the Holocaust are dwindling in number, and when antisemitism, Holocaust denial and xenophobia are on the rise again, the impetus EHRI provides to state-of-the-art Holocaust research, education and commemoration is more important than ever.”

News that the EU would fund a permanent facility was first announced in August 2019. The Amsterdam-based NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies will continue to coordinate the institutions’ work, EHRI said then.