We would like to highlight the work of the Czech Wikimedia Foundation, which has been sponsoring a project to photograph Jewish heritage sites in the Czech Republic.
The Jewish Monuments grant project aims to gather freely licensed photos of all existing Czech Jewish monuments, with particular focus on synagogues and cemeteries, whether those are still in religious use or are used for different purposes. The grant is part of Wikimedia Czech Republic’s Mediagrant project (see earlier blog post). It was launched in August 2011 and was inspired by projects documenting Czech municipalities, protected Natural Areas and Memorable Trees throughout the Czech Republic.
When we started planning, there was a wiki page containing a list of Czech Jewish cemeteries, some of which had articles about them; there were also several articles on major Czech synagogues and the portal of Judaism (Hebraistika). However, no records about the buildings of Czech synagogues were available for the photographers to check when planning a trip. Therefore it proved essential to put together all Czech Jewish monuments to show which had been documented sufficiently and which of them were still lacking any photographic documentation.
The first step was to make lists of the monuments by region, including the names of each (e.g. Synagogue in Slatina), the town and district they were situated in, their GPS location, a brief description commenting on the position, availability and usage of the building these days, and any photos already taken. When the 2012 Wiki Loves Monuments competition was about to start, and lists of Czech cultural monuments were being put together, the charts became a useful source of information on available photos. Logically, one of the grant rules is to fill in any newly photographed places in the charts to keep the information current and ready-to-use by other photographers.
See more information about this project here