In addition to archives and museum collections, the POLIN Museum collects, among other things, digital visual documentation concerning the material heritage of Jews from cities and towns located within the historical borders of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, i.e. on the territories of present-day Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Latvia, Estonia, and Russia.
We carry out the work in situ. We have prepared photographic (digital) documentation of several hundred items, more than a hundred of which are presented in the electronic catalogue Collections. These are digital photographs of monuments as well as Holocaust and memorial sites in places significant for the history of Polish Jews, including synagogues, cemeteries and other immovable monuments in Włodawa, Łańcut, Zamość, or Kraków. The documentation also included monuments from Ukraine, including Rohatyn, Uman, and Kalush. We also present images of Jewish extermination centres taken by drone (Treblinka, Bełżec, Auschwitz).
The resource is stored in the museum's digital repository, which also contains digital documentation of, for example, the unique wooden synagogues in Rēzekne and Ludza (now Latvia), Jewish monuments from today's Ukraine and Belarus or the former Königsberg (some of which are published on the Virtual Shtetl portal).
