A Teenager’s Holocaust Diary Is Changing the Way We Interact With Online Exhibitions

The YIVO Bruce and Francesca Cernia Slovin Online Museum has recently launched its second exhibition: Yitskhok Rudashevski: A Teenager’s Account of Life and Death in the Vilna Ghetto. The purpose of the museum is to tell the story of Jewish life in Eastern Europe and Russia and to showcase and contextualize some of the  24 million unique artifacts in the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research’s archive. We do this by focusing on the life of real people, as each exhibition is built around a character’s journey. The first exhibition was based on the life of Beba Epstein, a young Jewish woman who was born in 1922 in Vilna and went through the Holocaust. She was the only person from her family that survived. The museum aims to make the connection between the main character’s life and the larger historical context around them, toggling between both to show the interconnection between historical events and the consequences these events have on individual lives.  

The basis for the second exhibition is the diary that Yitskhok Rudashevski wrote while he was in the Vilna ghetto, which was found after the war by his cousin Sore, the only member of their family who survived. She gave the diary to Rudashevski’s mentor, the poet Avrom Sutzkever, who later gave it to YIVO in the late 1940s, where it remains today.  Rudashevski was chosen for the exhibition because of the singularity of his memoir. He focuses less on himself and more on observations of what was happening around him, and he does not hold back on criticism while also maintaining hope. He engages in resistance through culture by participating in several cultural and learning activities looking forward to the future of the Jewish community in defiance of the Nazis’ determination to destroy them.

The second exhibition of the YIVO online museum follows the conceptual guidelines that were established in the first exhibition. The storyline of each exhibition is divided into chapters, and each chapter focuses on a specific topic. You can follow the whole story from beginning to end or explore individual chapters, as they are full stories in themselves. Each chapter offers multiple levels of engagement - from the main narrative to the option to dive into deep historical context, artifact exploration, and links to additional resources. This digital approach democratizes access to rare historical documents and provides an engaging learning experience using video, animations, photos, written text, interactive 3D environments, games, and more. 

While the online museum strives to engage with new technologies as much as possible, what is groundbreaking is how the exhibitions were conceived. They were never meant to resemble an in-person experience, but rather somewhere between a movie, online newspapers, educational resources, and online exhibitions. The basis for this is the concept of transmedia narratives, which is the technique of telling a single story or story experience across multiple platforms and formats using current digital technologies. The museum uses a multiplicity of formats to showcase the narrative while following a story arc that is based on film storytelling. Each interactive feature was chosen based on which format best showcases a specific part of the story, so that the audience can grasp the main messages easily.

Rudashevski’s poignant diary provides several moments for this type of engagement. The chapter that is likely the most important in the exhibition focuses on “cultural resistance,” which was the act of maintaining Jewish culture as a way to fight Nazi tyranny despite the terrible conditions he found himself in. In this chapter several passages of his diary are brought to life through different media formats. The first section, called “Environment,” brings to light selected parts of his diary where he explores the ghetto as a space of extreme desperation. These entries were transformed into a graphic novel. The artistic nature of this medium is the perfect vector to depict a place whose intrinsic nature remained a desolate one, despite the hard work of many to improve the experience for themselves and others. Rarely was this desolate nature captured in photographs, so creating a graphic novel out of Rudashevski’s writings was a natural choice.

Another section in this same chapter features a selection of artifacts that illustrate passages from Rudashevski’s diary where he recounts the many activities he took part in while in the ghetto. Displaying the preserved artifacts is the perfect way to demonstrate what was available to them inside the ghetto, and highlights the courageous acts taken to preserve culture against all odds. Some of the selected artifacts relate directly to events that Rudashevski participated in, like the poster announcing an exhibition in the ghetto that he wrote about having worked on in his diary, and a sample questionnaire for a ghetto research group of which Rudashevski was a part of. The questionnaire was used to interview residents to record and preserve intangible aspects of ghetto life. By placing the actual artifacts next to his writings about them it’s possible to highlight the great importance of the often life-threatening efforts made to save these items, which now form part of the YIVO archives. Most of the objects in this section come from the collection that was saved by Avrom Sutzkever, a poet and Rudashevski’s mentor, and Schmerke Kaczerginski, a writer.

Two passages in Rudashevski’s diary where he reflects on some of the moral and ethical dilemmas in the Vilna Ghetto were transformed into animations, making what is probably the most impressive part of the exhibition. Rudashevski describes scenes of corruption from some members of the Jewish community who used their power to abuse other Jews, and he also describes what he observed about moments of weakness that exemplify the human condition.

(Above animation based on the diary of Yitskhok Rudashevski exploring themes of ethical and moral dilemmas observed by him in the Vilna ghetto. Courtesy of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.)

Lastly, some of the few personal entries of his diary were recorded as live-action videos with an actor playing Rudashevski. His personality as a writer and a leader of youth movements, his vision for the intellectual and creative efforts of his friends, and his fierce belief in survival and efforts to sustain hope are embodied in these depictions.

(Live-action video based on the diary of Yitskhok Rudashevski exploring his reflections while in the Vilna ghetto. Courtesy of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.) 

By combining powerful personal narratives with interactive elements, YIVO is not just preserving history but making it widely accessible to everyone, including new generations. Not only does the exhibition appeal to different learning styles, giving several entry points to his diary, but this innovative approach to online exhibitions has the potential to reshape how we interact with cultural institutions, historical content, and historical artifacts in the digital age. It offers a glimpse into the future of museums, where technology and storytelling converge to create deeply immersive and educational experiences that can be accessed from anywhere in the world.

We invite you to visit the YIVO online museum and to discover for yourself the full story of Yitskhok Rudashevski at https://museum.yivo.org.

Karolina Ziulkoski | READ MORE

Karolina Ziulkoski is a new media artist, designer, and curator. She holds a Master's degree from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU and bachelor's degrees in Architecture (UFRGS, summa cum laude) and Advertising (PUCRS, Outstanding Student Award). Ms. Ziulkoski is currently the Chief Curator of the YIVO Bruce and Francesca Cernia Slovin Online Museum and Director of Digital at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Before that, she developed interactive exhibitions for the American Museum of Natural History. She is a principal creator of Daemo, a Self-Governed Crowdsourcing Marketplace, a project of the Stanford Crowd Research Collective, and served as an adjunct professor at Rutgers University Visual Arts-Design program. Ms. Ziulkoski is the recipient, nominee and honoree of numerous awards, including the Inovapps award from the Brazilian Ministry of Communications, the Communication Arts Interactive Award, Webby Awards, VEGA Digital Award, Fashion & Beauty Clio Awards, Core77 Awards, and Lumen Prize. Ms. Ziulkoski is the creative director of the Museum of Municipalities, currently under construction in Brasília, Brazil, and her artwork has been shown in venues such as the New Museum, SPRING/BREAK Art Show, and Art Central Hong Kong. She was a member and a mentor at NEW INC, the New Museum's incubator for art, technology, and design in New York City.