Digital museum for the Jewish Culture and Heritage of Belarus: Wooden Synagogues Prototype

The long-term aim of the project is to create a participative online hub and digital museum about the Jewish culture and heritage of Belarus. This digital museum will be an open, interactive and popular space to centralise resources on Belarusian-Jewish history, produce tools for researchers and educators to support sound and critical education about the Belarusian-Jewish past, and to inspire curiosity about this Jewish heritage and encourage artists and cultural industries to revisit and use the material collected. It responds to the urgent need to protect, explore and educate about an undervalued history that is under threat because of the political situation in Belarus and the war in Ukraine.

The prototype, developed in collaboration with the Belarusian-Jewish Cultural Heritage Center, will be based on material relating to wooden synagogues (e.g. Volpa) and aims to offer a visualisation of how the different elements and functionalities of the platform will work together. The digital museum will offer access to and circulation between four spaces: 1. A searchable repository of primary sources; 2. A centre of usable learning and academic resources; 3. An online exhibition built around an object (in this case, a virtually reconstructed synagogue); 4. A creative hub to encourage and publish creative and artistic projects using the sources.