A Memorandum of Cooperation between the Jewish Historical Museum and the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory was signed as part of the project Distributed Archiving at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory (IFDT). The goal of this project is to protect and disseminate knowledge about events that are of key importance to our society and scientific research. Decentralized archiving is a barrier to oblivion and destruction of knowledge, as well as a guarantor of openness and universal free access to knowledge.
The Jewish Historical Museum (JIM) was created in response to the internal needs of the Yugoslav Jewish community and on the recommendations of the Jewish world and European organizations when in 1947 Dr. Albert Weiss proposed to the Executive Committee that a central archive should be established within the Federation of Jewish Communities, where a small number of historical documents, saved after the war and scattered throughout the archives of Jewish municipalities in Yugoslavia, would be preserved (JIM Guide to Archival Materials, 2021). JIM got its first permanent exhibition at Kralja Petra 71a in Belgrade in 1959.
The Jewish Historical Museum has agreed to transfer its digitized and non-digitized material related to anti-Semitism and the Holocaust (1941–1945) to the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory. This valuable material will now also be available to researchers in the country and abroad through the IFDT digital database.
The project Distributed Archiving at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory (IFDT) funded by the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web approaches cultural and historical heritage as a living, future-oriented process. It is our desire to rethink concepts such as the library, cultural heritage, and cultural memory and to incorporate into our work the noble goals of participatory culture in the age of digital technology and open and universal access to knowledge for all humanity.