Illuminating the Immigrant Experience: Level I Digital Start-Up Grant

FAIN: HD-50564-09

Eldridge Street Project, Inc./Museum at Eldridge Street (New York, NY 10002)
Annie Polland (Project Director: October 2008 to March 2009)
Hanna Griff-Sleven (Project Director: March 2009 to April 2010)

A series of planning meetings to develop a database and digital tools to link existing digital resources on the immigrant experience of the Lower East Side of New York.

We will convene a team of technology consultants, humanities researchers, K-12 teachers and partnering institutions to plan for the development of a highly interactive physical installation and web-based tool. This exhibit uses 1000+ turn-of-the-century congregants as starting points to investigate the occupational trajectories, family economy, and geographic and economic mobility of the Eastern European Jewish immigrants that made the Lower East Side the largest Jewish city in the world at the turn of the 20th century. The immigrants anchor an array of primary sources--census records, city directories, Yiddish newspaper clips, photos--that illuminate the NYC immigrant experience. We will explore ways to move beyond the current web-site offerings by prioritizing the contextualization of this information.