How to contribute

This project pursues telling the life stories of the many holocaust victims in Nuremberg, Germany – especially its Jewish population mostly located in the district of Gostenhof – that will sooner or later be forgotten.

Records about their lives are available in local archives and are publicly accessible. However, we consider the effort of visiting archives a huge boundary for people wanting to know more about individual stories. Without further investigation into otherwise located files, it only provides bits and pieces of information rather than a story. This approach does not pay them the respect they deserve.

Our goal is to create an online database recreating the victims’ stories and legacies by consolidating a variety of records. Where did they live? Who was part of their family? What did they do for a living? How did they contribute to society? And unfortunately, when have they been deported to a concentration camp? Have they survived or did they die there? Did they have relatives who survived?

Besides personal records, we are also looking into court files to investigate any lawsuits that have been filed and possible reparations that have been made to relatives.

In order to build up this database and connect the different elements of their lives, we are looking for people to help digitize these records. Some of them are handwritten in old-german handwriting and nowadays not everyone is able to read this. So we are looking for people able to read old-german handwriting and transfer it into our digital records.

If you can read old-german handwriting and would like to support this project, please reach out to us via info@jewishhistorygostenhof.de to discuss how you can best contribute.

Besides this, we are also looking for people, who are willing to visit the archives in Nuremberg and look up personal records and court rulings. Records can not be taken home, so if you are willing to research specific people (i.e. someone who may have lived in your building or street) you will have to read through records on-site and take notes for the database. If you would like to search the archives and gather inside into long files, please let us know.

The final element of consolidating information will be to sum up the persons’ or families’ history in a type of short biography and tell their story in a way, that makes them more than their faceless records or numbers; this short biography will keep their memory alive. If you are good at writing stories like this, feel free to join.

If you are interested to contribute in any of the above-mentioned ways, please send an email to contact@jewishhistorygostenhof.de.

We are looking forward to working with you!