The Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University is accepting applications for the 2026–2027 Blavatnik Archive Teacher Fellowship, a free curriculum-writing program for K–14 educators offered in collaboration with the Blavatnik Archive. This year’s theme, Reading Visual Propaganda, will invite fellows to examine twentieth-century visual materials from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, including posters, postcards, letters, newspaper illustrations, and photographs. Through a six-part webinar series and expert guidance, participants will develop classroom-ready unit plans using primary sources from the Blavatnik Archive. Educators who complete the fellowship will receive 20 PDPs/contact hours, and selected curriculum materials may be featured by the Davis Center and the Blavatnik Archive. Applications are open through June 1, 2026. Learn more and apply through the Davis Center here.
On Tuesday, May 12, 2026, from 6:30–8:00 p.m. EDT, the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University will host an online presentation introducing the Blavatnik Archive’s open-access digital collections on Soviet history, World War II, 20th-century Jewish culture, and the Holocaust. The program will highlight primary source materials—including postcards, photographs, posters, illustrations, and letters—and explore how educators and scholars can use the Archive’s digital tools for research, teaching, and classroom engagement. The event will feature Julie Reines Chervinsky, Director of the Blavatnik Archive, and Brandon Schechter, Historian at the Blavatnik Archive.
Join us on December 7, 2025 at The Academy Mansion in New York City for the final event of the Blavatnik Archive’s 20th Anniversary Celebration, marking two decades of preserving the everyday artifacts that illuminate overlooked histories. The program begins at 2:00 PM with Refuseniks and Activists: Actions and Consequences, a roundtable featuring Gennady Estraikh, Samuel Finkelman, Shaul Kelner, and Alexandra Zborovsky on the global movement for Soviet Jewish “Refuseniks,” followed at 3:30 PM by Zvi Gitelman’s reflection, How Do We Know What “Really” Happened?, exploring how archives help disentangle fact from distortion. The afternoon concludes with a 4:00 PM anniversary reception with drinks and refreshments.
The Blavatnik Archive Research Fellowships provide up to $2500 a term for outstanding scholars to study and disseminate its primary source materials: 145,000 items in 20th century Jewish and world history, with a special emphasis on World War I, World War II, and Soviet Russia. Generally, the Fellowship is non-residency: researchers will work online, using a high-resolution metadata-rich website that contains over 18,500 publicly available items from the Archive’s content management platform. For the Fall 2025 term beginning September 1, 2025, all applications must be submitted in English by July 15, 2025.
On January 27th, the Blavatnik Archive’s exhibition, Jewish Fighters in the Red Army: 1941-1945, will open to the public in the Center for Jewish History. Situated in the Center’s Great Hall, the exhibition will run until December 31, 2025. The exhibit is comprised of striking war-time portraits of Jewish veterans who fought in the Soviet army in World War II, and a rare selection from soldiers’ personal diaries. Recognizing that the stories of Jewish soldiers were mostly left out of the more familiar narratives about the Jewish experience of the war and the Holocaust, the Blavatnik Archive began to record and share their testimonies.
On the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the Blavatnik Archive is opening an exhibit at Altneu Synagogue in New York City on Thursday, January 16, 2025. The Archive’s resident historian, Brandon Schechter, will present an introduction to the exhibit, which is comprised of a collection of photographs made after the liberation of the camp, and discuss the intent of their creators.
For the philanthropic family, which fled the USSR in 1978-1979, the topic is a personal matter, but Alex Blavatnik tells eJP that he hopes the story resonates further. The Blavatnik Family Foundation, joined by the Arcadia Fund and the David Berg Foundation, is working to change that, funding a new digital archive — Refuseniks & Activists — that is dedicated to the Soviet Jewry movement and the Refuseniks, those Soviet Jews whose applications for exit visas were refused and who were then forced into horrid conditions for the sins of being Jewish and Zionist.
The Blavatnik Archive and the Center for Jewish History are excited to announce an upcoming exhibit on the famous Dreyfus Affair as seen through the lens of “Dreyfusard” and “anti-Dreyfusard” postcards from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The project was awarded the 2024 Digital Projects for the Public grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
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The Blavatnik Archive is a nonprofit foundation dedicated to preserving and disseminating materials that contribute to the study of 20th-century Jewish and world history, with a special emphasis on World War I, World War II, and Soviet Russia.
