Jewish German Bukovina 1918+

The collection "Jewish-German Bukovina 1918+" consists of several parts. One section includes historical newspapers that were produced during the interwar period in  – which was formerly Austrian and then part of Romania – primarily under Jewish editorship and written in German and Yiddish. Liberal gazettes such as the "Czernowitzer Morgenblatt" or the "Czernowitzer Allgemeine Zeitung" found a broad readership among German-speaking population groups, as they represented the interests of the national minorities in the new state, while the "Tšernowitzer bleter," the "Arbeter Tsaytung" or "Di frayhayt," which were printed in Yiddish, reflected political, cultural and ideological discourses within the Jewish community against the background of the Romanian government's increasing curtailment of the fundamental rights of Jews. Finally, from 1933, the newspaper "Czernowitzer Deutsche Tagespost" (Chernivtsi German Daily Post) aligned itself with Berlin and participated in numerous anti-Semitic smear campaigns, which ultimately led to the extermination of a large part of the Jewish population, also in Bukovina. "Die Stimme" (The Voice), founded by Elias Weinstein in 1944 in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine and which still exists today in Israel, became the printed information and communication platform for survivors of the Holocaust.

In addition to digitizing and putting online a periodical source corpus comprising a total of 16 titles, DiFMOE has integrated selected parts of the group's own archive with valuable personal and family documents into the digital library in cooperation with the Czernowitz Discussion Group, the worldwide virtual association of about 500 Jewish Bukovina Holocaust survivors and their descendants. Within the Jewish-German Bukovina 1918+ Collection, the integrated holdings of about 1,100 objects can be accessed both in their entirety and according to the individual private collections of the members.

A source of a special kind was made available by the German administrator of the Czernowitz Discussion Group, Edgar Hauster, from his personal family archive: 122 letters from the correspondence of the grandfather Elias Hauster with his son Julius Hauster (the second son Maximilian was murdered in Auschwitz in 1943), which give the reader a profound impression of everyday life, of the life of the soul, but above all of the great hardship of the Romanian Holocaust survivors immediately after the end of the Second World War (1946-1949). For the best possible communication and scholarly use of the contents of the outstanding historical testimony "The Correspondence of Elias Hauster", the high-resolution scans of the handwritten letters were combined with the transcriptions, also elaborately created by Edgar Hauster, in a digitally produced book and thus made fully text-searchable.