03 April 2024
Time to read: 15mins
We are pleased to announce that the winners of the IHRA Grant Program have now been chosen. This year, the IHRA Grant Program received a record number of applications from across the world. The IHRA’s Grant Review Committee, which is comprised of experts from various disciplines related to education and remembrance on the Holocaust and genocide of the Roma, have now chosen 16 projects to fund from Europe, North America, Asia, and Africa. Among other topics, these projects will collect and publish new survivor and witness testimonies, develop new toolkits and guidelines for educators and policymakers, tackle online Holocaust distortion, and locate and publish undiscovered historical archives.
Over the course of the past year, the IHRA Grant Program was updated following an external evaluation of the program. Today, the application process is simpler, there is greater outreach to publicize the grant program to organizations who may not be aware of it, and there is now an obligation for each grant recipient to integrate IHRA tools and resources into their project.
We are happy to report that these changes to the Grant Program have borne fruit. We received a diverse array of proposals from new organizations who have previously not worked with the IHRA and every project will now integrate existing IHRA tools and resources into their project design. This means that our expert-produced resources are now reaching new audiences in new locations.
Additionally, following Russia’s full-scale invasion, the IHRA has prioritized funding organizations applying from Ukraine. We have funded four Ukrainian organizations and two more organizations working with Ukrainian partners. These projects focus on collecting witness testimonies and safeguarding archives currently under threat due to the war. One of the projects will identify additional names of the victims of the Babyn Yar massacre, another will locate and preserve new archival records from the Transcarpathia region in western Ukraine, and another will train Ukrainian scholars working in Holocaust studies.
Finally, we are also excited to announce the winner of the Professor Yehuda Bauer Grant for a project which undertakes new and significant research on the Holocaust and antisemitism. This year’s winner is the University of Warsaw for their research project assessing the role of Holocaust distortion in populist politics in central and eastern Europe.
We look forward to shortly seeing the first results from each of these projects that we expect to start in May. If you are interested in applying for IHRA funding, please do so from June 19. Further details on the grant call will be published nearer the time on our website.
The participants will assess the role of Holocaust distortion in populist politics in Central and Eastern Europe by following three aspects that generate a high risk of Holocaust distortion in populist-governed countries: negation of expert knowledge (including established findings about Holocaust history), reliance on conspiracist visions of society (leading to antisemitic resentment, including secondary antisemitism), and whitewashing of national history (ostensibly in the interest of “the pure people”). In a dedicated module to a large nation-wide representative survey study conducted in Germany, Austria, Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, and Slovakia, the links between the endorsement of populist visions of democracy and the tendency to distort Holocaust history will be tested. The project’s scholars will utilize their recently created quantitative measures of Holocaust history distortions (Babinska & Bilewicz, 2024) and established measures of populism (Akkerman et al., 2014) to elicit the link and mechanisms that connect populist attitudes with Holocaust distortions. Generating such knowledge will serve as a tool to effectively confront Holocaust distortion in societies at risk of populism.
Applicant: University of Warsaw
Partnering Organizations: Institute for Research in Social Communication of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, ELTE Social Groups and Media Research Lab, Hungary
Together with their partners, the project aims to organize a series of online and face-to-face workshops with teacher trainers, multipliers, and policymakers from Bulgaria, Czechia, Croatia, Greece, Germany, Hungary, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, and Ukraine. The workshops will introduce the topic of education about the genocide of the Roma, address the lack of experience among educators about specific challenges, such as the lack of feedback from teachers to policymakers, teacher trainers, and textbook creators. By doing so, it will present opportunities in teaching this topic. The main output will be a publication aimed at decision- and policymakers, teacher trainers, and school curricula developers, with a summary of challenges in education about the genocide of the Roma identified by the teachers, and teachers’ suggestions on addressing these problems.
The project aims to back the national implementation of the forthcoming IHRA “Recommendations on Teaching and Learning about the Persecution and Genocide of the Roma during the Nazi Era.”
Applicant: Centropa
Partnering Organizations: Terraforming (Serbia), TENET Center for Social Transformations (Ukraine); Intercultural Institute Timisoara IIT (Romania)
Drawing on significant funding from the European Commission’s CERV, the project will expand on the existing IHRA Capacity Building Trainings on Holocaust Distortion, adapt and integrate them into new locales. Seeking to effectively combat Holocaust distortion, the project will empower teacher trainers, educational multipliers, decision makers, and policymakers with tools, knowledge, and skills. This multifaceted approach involves conducting a baseline study about perceptions of Holocaust distortion, tailor-made, localized educational resources, and inclusion of these resources into the new or existing trainings. By focusing on key themes—Distortion, Antisemitism, Protecting the facts, Media Literacy—the project will equip individuals with abilities such as, critical thinking, discerning bias, and analytical reasoning. The project aims to integrate the IHRA’s #ProtectTheFacts campaign, the IHRA Toolkit against Holocaust Distortion and connect to other IHRA efforts in this area. The resources will be used and translated into local languages following development in English.
Applicant: Zachor Foundation for Social Remembrance
Partnering Organizations: Aristotle University, Thessaloniki (Greece); University of Florence (Italy)
For many young Iranians, the only information on the Holocaust available through official channels is the government’s propaganda. By educating young Iranians about the Holocaust, the Sardari Project will seek to combat its denial in Iran. IranWire started the Sardari Project (sardariproject.com) with the support of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2020. Since then, they have produced hundreds of articles and videos that have reached millions of, primarily young, Iranians inside the country and around the world. Monitoring and targeting regime-sponsored Holocaust denial, the Sardari Project will produce educational content, such as short articles, videos, and animations suitable for social media, especially Instagram. Simultaneously, there will be tours planned for Iranian refugees and journalists in Europe to Holocaust sites, having the opportunity to produce films and share it with a broader audience.
Applicant: Journalism for Change, Inc.
Partnering Organizations: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum via IranWire partner Off-Centre Productions (United Kingdom)
After World War II, the archival material covering the Italian occupation of Croatia and Slovenia were spread throughout Italy, Croatia, and Slovenia. CDEC with partners from Italy, Croatia and Slovenia, will acquire a census of the archives and records in the Central State Archive, the Historical Archive of the Italian Army, the State Archives in Rijeka, and the Archives of the Republic of Slovenia. This will include digitization and metadata of the records concerning persecution of Jews. To facilitate long-term access to researchers, the material will be published online in English and in other languages on a website linked with the EHRI Portal and national archival portals.
Applicant: Fondazione Centro di Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea – CDEC
Partnering Organizations: Instituto centrale per gli Archivi (Italian Ministry of Culture)
The Ghetto Fighters House Museum in Israel, together with the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University, seeks to build an interactive website to showcase Haim Gouri’s films and provide online access to hundreds of hours of original, full– length unedited testimonies collected for his films. As part of this project, the anonymous voices of survivors in the film will be linked to and placed in the context of their original interviews. This project will highlight Gouri’s use of a unique and under-studied interview method. Gouri conducted group interviews, in which memories of survivors were repeatedly challenged and reinforced by other group members. The special viewings of the films will be followed by discussions, engaging educational policymakers and curators at museums and memorials to promote the use of the testimonies of a specially built website and on the Aviary platform.
Applicant: Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum
Partnering Organizations: Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University
In a time where the rise of far-right and far-left movements present new challenges to Holocaust remembrance and distortion as well as to human and minority rights, the project seeks to contribute to the ability of policymakers and interested organizations to tailor different responses to different forms of antisemitism and Holocaust distortion. This research project examines the ways the Holocaust is remembered across Europe and their intersection with different perceptions and manifestations of antisemitism and Holocaust distortion. Drawing on a previous study by Novis-Deutch, Lederman, Adams & Kochavi, the scholars raise a hypothesis that Holocaust memory in Europe functions as a “cultural code” (Volkov 1978) that marks one’s belonging to a particular political camp on the spectrum from the far left to the far right. They further argue that specific ways of understanding, remembering, and distorting the Holocaust are shared across Europe according to political affiliation; and that they are closely related to perceptions of and receptivity to distinct forms of antisemitism.
To rigorously examine this hypothesis, the researchers will use a mixed-method multimodal design that leverages comparative and interdisciplinary research approaches. Namely, using Quantitative Analysis, surveys will be conducted with representative samples from European nations. Using Qualitative Investigation, encompassing four countries with notably different roles during WWII and disparate post-war trajectories of Holocaust memory, the researchers will systematically analyze the ways politicians from across the political spectrum invoke the Holocaust in parliamentary debates, speeches, and on social media. Furthermore, they will scrutinize media reporting from across the political spectrum on discursive events related to the Holocaust. Finally, by conducting in-depth interviews with politically active university students, they will aim to understand how they comprehend their country’s role in the Holocaust, its meaning and relevance, as well as their perceptions of antisemitism.
Applicant: The University of Haifa
Partnering Organizations: The National Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam
KIgA (Kreuzberger Initiative against Antisemitism) and its partners will organize the translation into German of the IHRA/UNESCO-produced Capacity Building Training Program, including the Protect the Facts campaign. The training program will then be adapted to a German-speaking clientele and implemented in trainings for stakeholders, educators and civil society in Switzerland, Austria, and Germany. To gain a broader view internationally, the organizers will host a conference and a series of workshops with the program’s coordinators and trainers, experts, and other NGO participants, including ENCATE. Simultaneously, the conference will provide an exchange possibility of experiences and sustainability to enable other NGOs in German speaking countries to further disseminate the Capacity Building Training Program. This project will adopt and expand the reach of existing IHRA resources.
Applicant: Kreuzberger Initiative against Antisemitism/Kreuzberger Initiative gegen Antisemitismus e.V.
Partnering Organizations: Universität Bern (Switzerland); Erinnern (Austria)
Learn about the major events and achievements under the 2023 Croatian IHRA Presidency.
The seven excellent initiatives selected as 2021 IHRA Grant Projects represent innovative approaches to countering distortion and safeguarding the record of the Holocaust and the genocide of the Roma.
The IHRA Grant Program enables us to support the work of other organizations by funding their projects that counter distortion and safeguard the record.
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