Help us Preserve the Jewish Heritage of South Wales!

Dear Friends,

I am writing to you on behalf of the Jewish History Association of South Wales. Since January 2017, we have been working on collecting and preserving the Jewish heritage of South Wales; we recorded 72 oral histories and created a digital collection consisting of more than 6000 images. To share the results of our work, we have launched, on the 17th of June, a 14-week long travelling exhibition and are organising 22 talks across south Wales; one of the talks was delivered to Merthyr Tydfil Historical Society on the 3rd of June. Our current project, supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund and Jewish Historical Society of England, will end in September this year.

However, there is still so much more to do, and we are preparing a new funding application to the National Lottery Heritage Fund (to be submitted by mid-July at the latest). Our new project will include collecting oral histories and tangible material to preserve the heritage and working with local museums, archives, and libraries to identify the Jewish material in their collections, improve interpretations, and digitise the material to make it more accessible. We also intend to continue promoting Jewish heritage of south Wales by creating the Jewish heritage trails in Cardiff and Merthyr Tydfil.

The new project is estimated at around £60,000 and we need to raise 10% (£6,000.00) of the total value to support our application. As part of our fundraising efforts, we have launched a 4-week long crowdfunding campaign, which can be accessed at https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/jhasw. The aim of the campaign is to raise £3,000 as part of a bid for National Lottery Heritage funding.

This crowdfunding appeal runs in parallel with other fundraising efforts; in total, we are hoping to raise 10% (£6,000.00) of the project’s total value to support our application. We are running an ‘all or nothing’ campaign, which means that we need to raise 100% of our target to receive any money. If our project does not reach its target by Friday, the 12^th of July, at 13:00, no money is taken from our supporters and our project will not be funded.

Please donate whatever you can – every donation, no matter how large or small, helps towards us achieving our goal. And please share the link to our crowdfunding page with your family and friends, and anyone who is interested in preserving Jewish heritage!

Please get in touch, if you have any questions: klavdija.erzen@jhasw.org.uk.

Klavdija Erzen
JHASW Project Manager