Bremen Goes the Distance in “Transcribathon” of LBI Collections

Archival Collections at LBI New York and Jerusalem related to the Bremen Rabbi Leopold Rosenak (1868–1923) were the focus of a crowdsourcing event at the University Of Bremen in June 2022.

History students from across Germany met in the city on the Weser this summer for the University of Bremen’s Public History program’s first ever “Summer School” from June 13-17.

Public History Bremen trains historians in practical aspects of engaging a broad public beyond the academic realm with historical knowledge. The core of the Summer School involved using the platform “Transcribathon.eu”, a crowdsourcing and citizen science platform for describing, annotating, transcribing and geo-referencing historical collections. First developed by the Berlin fi rm Facts and Files, “Transcribathon.eu” was adopted by the EU’s cultural heritage platform Europeana for various projects that enrich the digital collections aggregated by Europeana. Those collections include over 10,000 records from the LBI Archives, and the Summer School focused on the archival collections of the Bremen Rabbi Leopold Rosenak, which are located in the LBIs in New York and Jerusalem. Born in Hungary, Rosenak married Bella Carlebach (1876–1961), a daughter of the well-known rabbinical family from Lübeck, and became the Rabbi of the Jewish Community in Bremen in 1896. In his 27-year career in Bremen, he was enormously influential and is remembered especially for his service as a Field Chaplain in WWI and his efforts to support the Jewish refugees fleeing Eastern Europe during and after the War. He died suddenly in 1923 aboard a ship while returning from a lecture tour in the United States.

In a few days, the five teams of participants managed to transcribe over 800,000 characters from 409 documents in Rosenak’s papers, as well as an unpublished memoir by Bella Rosenak.

The program also included visits to nearby museums, such as the German Emigration Center, and a historical city tour that stopped at the Rosenak’s former home.

Members of the public are invited to create an account and contribute to transcriptions at transccribathon.eu.

From LBI News 114.