USC Shoah Foundation launched new partnership with JewishGen.org

"We tend to forget that the Holocaust was not only the murder of Jewish people, but the attempt at total erasure of their names, their places of birth and death."

By JERUSALEM POST STAFF
Holocaust Survivor Edward Mosberg outside Birkenau. (photo credit: WWW.FROMTHEDEPTHS.ORG)
Holocaust Survivor Edward Mosberg outside Birkenau.
(photo credit: WWW.FROMTHEDEPTHS.ORG)
Jewish genealogy service and affiliate of the Museum of Jewish Heritage, JewishGen.org, will be partnering with the USC Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive to integrate the data from the nearly 50,000 available Jewish Holocaust survivor testimonies onto its platform.
"JewishGen seeks to connect researchers with family information, while educating them about the history, culture and values that defined the lives of our ancestors," said JewishGen’s Executive Director Avraham Groll. "As a result of this new partnership, invaluable genealogical information will be made accessible to the Jewish genealogical community, and a critical sense of communal memory will be preserved and transmitted to future generations."
The data found in the interviews throughout USC Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive contains possible sources of genealogical and family information, filling in gaps that might have otherwise been overlooked. By using details such as name, place of birth, date of birth, date of death, etc., the data could be used to find additional relatives, aliases, historical and other biographical information.
"We tend to forget that the Holocaust was not only the murder of Jewish people, but the attempt at total erasure of their names, their places of birth and death," said Finci-Viterbi Executive Director at USC Shoah Foundation Stephen Smith. "We have partnered with JewishGen to help families researching their histories to fill the void, reclaim their names and their pasts. Just to see a document with their name on a list, can help restore them back to humanity."
"JewishGen is one of the ways we continue to remember and to educate," said Museum of Jewish Heritage President & CEO Jack Kliger. "It is how we reaffirm Jewish life and its value, by committing to uncover each name and committing to return each name to its proper context: the years, the place, and the family to which it belonged."
USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive is the largest digital collection of its kind in the world. Currently encompassing 115,000 hours of video testimony, the archive is an invaluable resource for humanity, with nearly every testimony containing a complete personal history of life before, during, and after the interviewee’s firsthand experience with genocide.
The Visual History Archive is digitized, fully searchable, and hyperlinked to the minute. This indexing allows students, professors, researchers, and others around the world to retrieve entire testimonies or search for specific sections within testimonies through a set of 65,600 keywords and key phrases, 1.95 million names, and 719,000 images.
Initially a repository of Holocaust testimony, the Visual History Archive has expanded to include testimonies from the Armenian Genocide that coincided with World War I, the 1937 Nanjing Massacre in China, the Cambodian Genocide of 1975-1979, the Guatemalan Genocide of 1978-1983, the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, and the ongoing conflicts in the Central African Republic and South Sudan, and anti-Rohingya mass violence. It also includes testimonies about contemporary acts of violence against Jews.
JTA contributed to this report.