FONDAZIONE CENTRO DI DOCUMENTAZIONEEBRAICA CONTEMPORANEA -CDEC ASSOCIAZIONE

Their core work

Fondazione CDEC is Italy's primary archival and research institution dedicated to documenting contemporary Jewish history and the Holocaust. They maintain irreplaceable primary source collections — wartime documents, survivor testimonies, photographs, and administrative records — related to the persecution of Jews in Italy during WWII and postwar Jewish life. Within the EHRI network, they serve as Italy's national node, making these collections digitally discoverable and accessible to scholars across Europe. Their operational work combines archival curation, historical research, and digital infrastructure contribution.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

CDEC's H2020 participation covers a single continuous trajectory — two successive phases of the same EHRI infrastructure — making it impossible to detect a thematic pivot from the project data alone. What the timeline does show is institutional continuity: they committed to the same infrastructure program from 2015 through at least 2025, deepening their digital capabilities rather than diversifying into new domains. No keyword data was available for either phase, so any finer-grained evolution analysis would be speculative.

Their unbroken participation across two EHRI generations indicates they are building toward a permanent institutional role in European Holocaust research infrastructure, not pursuing one-off project funding.

How they like to work

CDEC participates exclusively as a consortium member, never as coordinator — consistent with the role of a specialist archive contributing unique collections rather than project management capacity. Their two projects are both within the same large EHRI consortium, which spans 25 partners across 17 countries, so their network breadth comes from a single long-running collaboration rather than many separate engagements. Prospective partners should expect CDEC to contribute deep domain expertise and source access, not administrative leadership.

CDEC's 25 consortium partners across 17 countries are entirely embedded in the EHRI network, which is one of the broadest humanities research infrastructures in Europe, linking national archives, memorial institutions, and universities from Israel to the UK. Their geographic reach is pan-European with a clear humanities and memory-institution cluster.

What sets them apart

CDEC holds a de facto monopoly position in Italy for Holocaust documentation: no other Italian institution has a primary mandate and archival depth in this domain, making them the obligatory Italian partner for any European consortium working on Holocaust research, Jewish heritage, or WWII persecution records. For digital humanities projects that need Southern European or Mediterranean Holocaust sources, CDEC fills a gap that no university library or general archive can replicate. Their long tenure in EHRI also means they bring established working relationships with every major Holocaust archive in Europe.

Highlights from their portfolio

• EHRI
  The founding phase of the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure — the largest and most complex distributed humanities archive project funded under H2020, establishing federated digital access across 19 countries.
• EHRI-3
  The scaling phase running through 2025, confirming CDEC's sustained role as Italy's permanent node in a long-lived European research infrastructure rather than a time-limited project.