The conference “Beyond Digital Awe. European Jewish Studies and the Challenge of Digital Humanities” will take place in Vilnius on 17–18 November 2025. The conference reviews the current state of integration between Digital Humanities, Jewish memory institutions and Jewish Studies researchers.
Over the past decade, the digital humanities (DH) have experienced rapid growth in academia. Yet, despite numerous conferences and dedicated edited volumes, the relationship between established disciplines and institutions remains cautious. DH are established as separate curricula, sets of workshops or labs, and weakly integrated into the core humanities. As Irene Zwiep wrote in 2022, the same year that generative artificial intelligence debuted, “we are once again forced to fundamentally rethink the existing order of knowledge.”
The conference focuses on three key areas that make Jewish Studies digital and digital humanities Jewish: experimenting, sharing, engaging.
Experimenting. From the outset, the main agenda of the DH has been to develop new methods or, more often, to apply methods borrowed from other disciplines. The value of the tools lies as much in their direct output as in the mind-expanding aspect of testing new approaches and seeking alternative sources, such as images, geolocated objects, or textual (big) data. Within this focus we discuss the extent to which the techno-progressive, if not counter-cultural, utopian agenda of radical DH is compatible with Jewish Studies.
Sharing. DH are about connecting researchers, repositories and data. The idea of openness raises several issues. Some of these are practical and relate to the readiness of institutions to produce Open Access repositories that provide findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable, or simply FAIR data. Other questions concern the epistemological underpinnings of the shift underway. If DH are about breaking down disciplinary boundaries, to what extent does “Jewish” provide an appropriate framework for the digital transformation of knowledge and institutions?
Engaging. The introduction of DH creates a tension between the centrality of ‘innovative’ methods and the goal of broadening the impact of digital transformation on citizens. If institutions and scholars are slow to embrace new paradigms, are consumers of history more ready for change? How building ontologically rich online repositories, museums, libraries and archives can engage citizens?
Conference committee: Vilnius University: Tomasz M. Jankowski (head) · Jurgita Verbickiene · Sergii Gurbych · Kseniya Tserashkova; University of Wroclaw: Wojciech Tworek · Marcin Wodziński.
Download the program in PDF from the Vilnius University website.
17 November. Day 1. Monday
Welcome · Universiteto g. 7 · Room 331 (9:00–9:15)
Tomasz M. Jankowski · Loreta Skurvydaitė · Jurgita Verbickienė · Vilnius University · Marcin Wodziński · University of Wrocław
Keynote lecture
Irene Zwiep · Amsterdam University
Turn, turn, turn: methodological turns and the limits of the Humanities
Coffee break (10:00–10:30)
Seeing (through) the text (10:30–12:00)
Moderator · Tomasz M. Jankowski
Sergii Gurbych · Vilnius University
From handwriting to historical insight: applying DH tools to Yiddish WWI memoirs from Eastern Europe
Benjamin Schnabel · Technical University of Applied Sciences Mannheim
OCR correction in historical Jewish journals
Sinai Rusinek · Open University of Israel
Next AI frontiers for digital projects in Jewish Studies
Lunch break · Grey · Pilies g. 2 (12:00–13:30)
The Holocaust. New approaches, new challenges (13:30–15:00)
Moderator · Sinai Rusinek
Justina Smalkyte · Sciences Po Paris
Urban neighborhoods as sites of persecution: Mapping anti-Jewish repression in Vilnius, summer 1941
Catrina Langenegger · University of Basel
Refugee care in Switzerland during World War II in the light of historical statistics and GIS
Aharona Rosenthal · University of Maryland, Baltimore County
When the survivors are gone, will Siri speak for them?
Coffee break (15:00–15:30)
A view from above. Digitising collections (15:30–17:15)
Moderator · Sergii Gurbych
Jonah Lubin · Harvard University
Parker Robbins · University of Chicago
Sinai Rusinek · Open University of Israel
Introducing YiDraCor: A TEI XML encoded corpus of Yiddish drama
Gadi Sagiv · Open University of Israel
Structuring the sacred: A Digital Humanities approach to hasidic stories (1814-1914)
Ina Pukelyte · Vytautas Magnus University
Esther-Rachel Kaminska theater museum digital collection
Yevhen Zakharchenko · Karazin Kharkiv National University
‘I survived the Nazis, I will survive the Rashists’. The World War II and the Holocaust in the current Ukrainian discourse on the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war
18 November. Day 2. Tuesday
Spatialising Jewish history (9:00–10:30)
Moderator · Jurgita Verbickienė
Kseniya Tserashkova · Vilnius University
Darya Tselesh · Independent researcher
Mapping for local history projects: from archival document to user model
Marcin Wodziński · University of Wroclaw
DH research on Hasidism
Tomasz M. Jankowski · Vilnius University
The transnational Jewish family? Spatial evidence from early-modern census data
Coffee break (10:30–11:00)
Curating the past for the future (11:00–12:30)
Moderator · Marcin Wodziński
Anna Hirsh · Historian, museums and collections consultant
Fragments & Memories: The digital & analogue reinterpretation of a lost synagogue mural
Daniel Burckhardt · Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies
[Hi]stories of the German-Jewish diaspora:
A hybrid publication project
Simon Rabinovitch · Northeastern University
Teaching and Learning with the Jewish Migration Project
Lunch break · Grey · Pilies g. 2 (12:30–14:00)
(In)Visible minorities (14:00–15:30)
Moderator · Catrina Langenegger
Tim Buchen · University of Wroclaw
Measuring a minority in a minority. Leadership and success among Breslau’s Jews 1850-1933
Victoria Gerasimova · University of Warsaw
Gaps in the map, maps in the narrative? Jewish Representation on a digital cultural map of Polish Lands, 1865–1914. Preliminary findings of the Vademecum project
Saule Valiūnaitė · Lithuanian Institute of History
In search of the under-researched. The case of Vilna Yiddishist women
Coffee break (15:30–16:00)