Professional Background
Ethan Rogers received his master’s and bachelor’s degrees in architecture from Northeastern University in Boston. His research interests lie at the intersection of the built environment, digital documentation, historic preservation, and immersive storytelling. Mr. Rogers was the recipient of the Holocaust Legacy Foundation’s Gideon Klein Award, which allowed him to conduct research on and curate an immersive walkthrough of the Secret Synagogue of Terezín. The Secret Synagogue, a storage room that was adorned with Hebrew texts and Jewish symbols, was a space of spiritual resistance where Jewish inmates clandestinely worshiped and held onto their traditions before many were transported to extermination camps. As part of his research, Mr. Rogers traveled to Terezín to hand-measure the space and speak with relatives of the Synagogue’s creator, Artur Berlinger. The project outputs included digital and physical models that show the space in its original condition and capture the emotional weight of the words that still adorn its walls.
Mr. Rogers’ work has extended beyond Holocaust-related sites to include using photogrammetry to document and digitally capture a historic community center in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, one of the few remaining buildings to survive urban renewal efforts in the 1960s.
Fellowship Research
While at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as a Bella and Murray Ressler Digital Humanities Fellow, Ethan Rogers will work on his research project, “Architecture of Spiritual Resistance: Preserving Jewish Faith in Physical and Digital Form.” Building on his research on Terezín, he will more broadly study spaces of spiritual resistance across Nazi-occupied territories, focusing on the ways communities preserved Jewish life through prayer, education, and the concealment of religious objects.
In the first phase of his project, Mr. Rogers will utilize Museum resources, including the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos and tools such as ArcGIS to map the extent of spiritual resistance in ghettos and concentration camps during the Holocaust. In the second phase, he will focus on specific spaces of spiritual resistance documented in sketches and drawings that visually depict how religious life was sustained within these makeshift spaces. He will use these depictions alongside survivor testimony to generate digital models that serve as the foundation of new immersive experiences, offering contemporary viewers a way to understand the conditions of these spaces and how the Jewish community preserved their faith, hope, and traditions amidst persecution.
Residency Period: September 1, 2026 – May 30, 2027