YIVO Introduces Trendsetting Digital Exhibits for Holocaust Education

In today’s digital world, many museums provide access to online exhibits as “value-added” benefits to what the museums offer in person. Now, some museums are going a step further, curating in-depth exhibitions that are exclusively available online. One example is the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research’s Bruce and Francesca Cernia Slovin Online Museum, which so far has curated two exhibitions, both structured around the lives of teenagers from Vilna during the Holocaust. 

The inaugural exhibition, “Beba Epstein: The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Girl,” launched in August 2020. This past July, a second exhibition, “Yitskhok Rudashevski: A Teenager’s Account of Life and Death in the Vilna Ghetto,” also launched. Beba Epstein survived the Vilna ghetto and Auschwitz. After the war she married and built a life in the United States. Yitskhok Rudashevski was murdered by the Nazis at the age of 15.

Karolina Ziulkoski, chief curator of the online museum, calls these exhibits “a groundbreaking approach to digital curation and interactive storytelling. They were planned in a way to demonstrate how technology can breathe new life into historical artifacts, making them relevant to contemporary audiences,” she said. While people were already used to exploring existing on-site collections as digital extensions of physical institutions, Ziulkoski’s challenge was to find effective ways to engage and keep the attention of online visitors. 

“[The exhibits] were planned in a way to demonstrate how technology can breathe new life into historical artifacts, making them relevant to contemporary audiences.” – Karolina Ziulkoski

The stories about these two teenagers are told through “transmedia narratives,” using a combination of written text as well as digital technologies including animations, videos, interactive 3D environments, games, and dozens of archival objects. Complementing one another, these narratives coalesce around a single story or story experience across multiple platforms and formats.

“It’s not just young people who needed these options,” Ziulkoski said. “Today, older people also consume internet content like this. We designed these exhibits for the digital medium, and not an age demographic.” 

The Yitskhok Rudashevski exhibition grew out of a diary the boy kept when he lived in the Vilna ghetto from age 13 to 15. When the diary was first discovered after the war, historians were stunned by the mature insights and remarkable literary powers in a person so young. Many excerpts from the diary are part of the exhibit, both in text format as well as through video dramatizations.  Beba Epstein did not leave a diary but had written a pre-war autobiography for school. Her exhibit grew out of this autobiography, as well as post-war interviews she recorded through a Holocaust survivor testimonies project, contemporaneous letters sent to family members, and historical documents. Both exhibits offer historical context and a flavor of their home and community life both before and during the war. Beba’s post-war journey is explored as well. 

The online museum tries to appeal to multiple audiences, which may explain why some of the material is written in very simple language, as if for an audience with little knowledge or sophistication. Other access points bring the user to much more sophisticated text and historical documents. There is a plethora of historical context from validated sources based on rigorous scholarship.

With a goal of modernizing Holocaust education and making it accessible internationally, YIVO has provided workshops on the Beba Epstein exhibit for K-12 teachers in both Jewish and non-Jewish schools in the United States and Europe, as well as programs for general audiences from around the world. Since the Rudashevski exhibit is brand new, training workshops for it are only now being scheduled.  

Douglas Greene, director of Jewish Community Relations at the Jewish Federation of Greater Charlotte, helped create some of the teacher lessons for the Beba Epstein exhibit, which he called a “unique and deeply personal glimpse into Beba’s life before, during, and after the Holocaust.” While many other Holocaust education resources are too academic for students, the interactive learning approach online can better meet students’ diverse needs, he said. 

Dr. Deborah Fripp is executive director of Teach the Shoah, which trains people of all ages, generations, and backgrounds to share testimony-based stories of the Holocaust. She was impressed with these exhibits’ ability to “teach history through real stories that happened to real people.” Many educators with Teach the Shoah now use excerpts of Yitskhok Rudashevski’s diary in their teaching, and are using these exhibits as additional tools to deepen their students’ understanding of his story. 

Since its launch in 2020, YIVO’s online museum has had close to 51,000 visitors from an astonishing 161 countries, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. The Lithuanian government helped pay for the translation of the Beba Epstein exhibit into Lithuanian, as it will be used as part of Holocaust education in their school system. A teacher training program for teachers in Lithuania is currently in the works. 

YIVO’s Chief of Staff Shelly Freeman observes that while the diary of Anne Frank is universally known, the diaries of other Jewish teens, such as Yitskhok Rudashevski and the brief autobiography of Beba Epstein, are bringing new stories to light in Holocaust education. Sharing their own words, along with primary source material such as an Auschwitz logbook of prisoners’ names and tattoo numbers, and a survey Rudashevski designed and carried out to chronicle life in the Vilna ghetto, these people feel more real and relatable. “There were 6 million Rudashevskis,” Freeman observes. “These exhibits not only preserve history but make it viscerally accessible to new generations,” she said.

Access the exhibits here: https://museum.yivo.org/

Judy Gruen is the author of “Bylines and Blessings,” “The Skeptic and the Rabbi,” and several other books. She is also a book editor and writing coach.