About the project
The Jewish cemetery in Hlukhiv (Sumy region, Ukraine) is the only Jewish necropolis in the east of Ukraine where many gravestones from the 19th - early 20th centuries have been preserved. Many of them are of historical and artistic value. Because of the destruction of gravestones under the influence of anthropogenic and natural factors, the issue of preserving individual gravestones and Hlukhiv Jewish cemetery as a whole has been raised for many years.
This site was created as part of the joint work of the Educational and Scientific Institute of Philology and History of Oleksandr Dovzhenko Hlukhiv National Pedagogical University (Hlukhiv, Ukraine) and Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies (Jerusalem, Israel). The main goal of this project is to preserve Hlukhiv Jewish cemetery.
Students and post-graduate students of the Educational and Scientific Institute of Philology and History of Oleksandr Dovzhenko Hlukhiv National Pedagogical University take part in the work. They are future teachers who are able to instil the respect for the Jewish heritage of Ukraine in the younger generations as part of Ukrainian heritage. Preserving the cemetery will also be facilitated by applying digital technologies, which allow not only to save digitized images of tombstones, but also to use new opportunities for information search, data analysis and visualization. Due to the combination of computer capabilities with humanities methodologies, it was possible to present Hlukhiv Jewish cemetery as a whole as a phenomenon of Jewish culture, which is radically different from the Ukrainian one.
The site presents complete information about the Jewish cemetery in Hlukhiv and a unique database of all necropolis burials created specifically within this project. It contains not only information about burials, but also geodata of each burial, information about epitaphs, ornaments, etc. A fundamentally new quality of data and its structure allow you to receive, analyse and visually display search results. By combining different types of data and their visualization, it became possible to create a visual representation of the cemetery and Jewish funeral traditions. For example, by displaying the search results in the form of a cemetery map, you can see the location of women's and men's plots, plots for burying kohens, plots for burying unmarried young men and women, and many other parameters. Such visualization promotes a deeper analysis of data, enables the continuation of research activities and introduces the general public to the culture and traditions of the Jewish people.
