Workflows related to the history of Jewry in the Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén County Archives of the National Archives of Hungary

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to present a special part of the professional work carried out at the Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén County Archives of the National Archives of Hungary, which aims to promote the discovery and accessibility of Jewry-related sources, primarily those associated with the Holocaust. In my paper, I will describe in detail our cataloguing and digitisation work over the past fifteen years, presented in terms of source groups, and through the presentation of individual collections of documents, I will draw attention to the usefulness of researching some of the less researched records.Practical questions and tasks to be solved were the motivation for the consistent programme aimed at the exploration of Jewry-related documents in our member institution. Namely, at the end of the 2000s, the Alsózsolca Branch Archives of the county archives received a significant number of citizenship cases and Holocaust-related applications from people of Jewish origin. In addition, a large number of genealogists contacted our institution inquiring about similar documents. Some of the documents concerned did not have any filing aids (filing books, index books), which made the work very difficult. To remedy this situation, in 2009, a wave of auxiliary records creation was started in the Alsózsolca Branch Archives of the Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén County Archives, which later extended to other departments of the archives – now the Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén County Archives of the National Archives of Hungary. In the present paper, we would like to discuss the data content and usability of the most important documents kept in our institution related to the history of the Jewry in the 20th century, as well as the archival processing work aimed at making these documents more easily and quickly accessible. The collections are divided into two groups that cannot necessarily be separated from each other, so that the collections relating to the Holocaust and those relating to other citizenship cases are treated separately.