About the project
General information about the project
The Internet project "J-Doc", initiated by the NADAV Foundation in 2017, is a digital archive of historical documentation, drawn from official Soviet-era documents. Taken together, they reflect on the policy of the Soviet state towards Jews. Our site provides access to documents accessed from archives in the Former Soviet Union. They reflect the history of anti-Jewish repressions, the struggle of Jewish communities for survival, as well as evidence of opposition to the totalitarian state on the part of informal Jewish associations and individuals. There are various websites that highlight political repressions in the USSR and document their victims, but this is the first and so far, the only site dedicated to the topic of state anti-Semitism in the USSR. The J-Doc site is intended for professional researchers, students, and a wide range of people with an interest in this topic.
The expressions of state anti-Semitism in the USSR, which were manifest already in the inter-war years, intensified during World War II and reached its peak during the repressions of the late 1940s and early 1950s. After Stalin's death, it was not condemned by either state or other official public bodies. Indeed, having taken root in the ranks and higher echelons of the Communist Party, anti-Semitism remained a factor for decades in the ways that the Soviet state conducted its policies towards its Jewish citizens. The documents that were discovered and gathered for this online archive cover more than half a century of the existence of the Soviet Union up to its collapse in the early 1990s.
WHAT ARCHIVES DO WE COOPERATE WITH?
A list of the archives we have cooperated with to date appears here. At the moment, the site contains mainly materials from Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. We hope that in the near future we will be able to expand the geography of our research. All digital copies obtained with the full agreement of cooperating Archives are publicly accessible on our web site and may be cited with proper attribution.
FUTURE PLANS
The lives of Soviet Jews in the era of late Stalinist rule is a subject in which the NADAV Foundation has shown particular interest for many years. In its initial phase, "J-Doc" is already the largest open source of archival documents containing testimony regarding targeted pressure brought to bear on the Jewish population by the state, particularly in the post-war years of the Stalinist regime. Over the long term, as we continue to develop the project, we aim to expand the chronological framework so as to include documents dating from the 30s to the 70s of the 20th century.
Academic advisory committee
- Prof. Ziva Galili (Rutgers University)
- Prof. Eli Lederhendler (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
- Prof. Benjamin Nathans (University of Pennsylvania)
- Prof. Amir Weiner (Stanford University)