14 September 2026

Photo: Ivana Vučina Simović

Sebastian Schirrmeister, Michael Studemund Halévy (Eduard Duckesz Fellow Hamburg), and Agnieszka August-Zarębska

The prize honours his outstanding and innovative contributions to Jewish Studies.

At the CSMC, Schirrmeister led the project ‘A Fresh Look: Visualising Digitised German-Jewish Archives’ (RFE22, 2024–2025), building on his earlier work as Research Associate on ‘Wandering Artefacts: The Materialistic History of German-Jewish Archives’ (RFE10, 2020–2024). The underlying material for both projects stems from a large-scale digitisation effort: between 2021 and 2022, the CSMC and the National Library of Israel (NLI) jointly digitised 24 personal archives and collections of 19th- and 20th-century German-Jewish intellectuals, comprising more than 700,000 pages.

Schirrmeister addressed a key challenge arising from this massive digitisation: how to make such a gigantic amount of multilingual and heterogeneous material accessible and navigable for users with different interests. His project pursued three exemplary approaches: a digital edition of a multilingual guestbook from 20th-century Jerusalem; an online exhibition of selected Hamburg-related documents from the NLI archives; and a full digital representation of the archive of Moritz Lazarus (1824–1903). Using open-source tools such as the VIKUS Viewer, the project developed ways to filter by keywords, sort by dates and languages, and visualise patterns in the material, offering possibilities that go beyond what the original physical documents can provide.

The online exhibition ‘Between Hamburg and Jerusalem. Archival Excursions’, curated by Schirrmeister and Anna Menny (Institute for the History of the German Jews, Hamburg), highlights transnational networks and migration movements between the two cities from the 19th to the 21st century.

The Eduard Duckesz Prize is awarded every two years by the Eduard Duckesz Fellow (Hamburg) and the Moses Mendelssohn Academy in Halberstadt and is endowed with 3,000 Euros. It recognises outstanding and innovative work in the fields of Jewish Studies. The 2026 award ceremony took place on 26 August at the Institute for Jewish Studies at the University of Wrocław as part of the 15th Sephardic Summer School. Alongside Schirrmeister, the Polish literary scholar and Sephardic studies expert Agnieszka August-Zarębska (Wrocław) also received the prize.