The Jewish Historical Society of Southwest Florida Inc

The organization aims to establish the Virtual Museum to serve the Jewish population of Southwest Florida, of which Collier County is the newest and fastest growing Jewish community. The ultimate goal is to place all footage, interviews, archives, maps and other documents into the Virtual Museum to allow access to every member, regardless of their permanent or seasonal status. Some of exhibits will be available to general public online.

JHSSWF strategy is to strengthen the collection for Virtual Museum by expanding the number of witness interviews/films about them, adding archives, and creating educational films and exhibits, which will be available either through virtual museum or on demand to anyone seeking information about Jewish presence in Collier and other Southwest Florida Counties and the contributions Jews made to this region.

JHSSWF had been interviewing witnesses to Collier County's emergence of Jewish presence since 2011. We have collected initial archives, maps, photos and footage, and are continuing to gather further information, interviews and build up our collections for Virtual Museum. We are in a unique position to create such museum, because it is an emerging form of museums, whereby every exhibit is residing online. Our board members, volunteers and vendors have experience and expertise to populate the Virtual Museum database and create the online presence through website maintenance and social networking presence, once the Virtual Museum software is acquired and installed on JHSSWF dedicated computer. Our film collection will continue to increase and we will bring them out to the entire community with the purpose of historical preservation and education, one film at a time, while the witnesses or early Jewish History are still alive.

We have not yet acquired a dedicated computer to house Virtual Museum software and the museum archives and have not yet purchased the software. Because software gets updates and new releases are available, we will acquire such software at the same time as we get full hardware acquisition funded.