The University Libraries are pleased to announce acquisition of the unabridged version of the Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive®, a collection of audiovisual interviews comprising 55,000 eyewitness testimonies of witnesses and survivors of the Holocaust and genocides in Nanjing, Rwanda, Armenia, Guatemala, and Cambodia. The Archive was established by Steven Spielberg in 1994.

Access to this unparalleled archive is available to all current YU students at any level as well as to all YU faculty and staff on campus and by authentication off campus.

Noteworthy is the unique collaboration of the University Libraries, The Emil A. and Jenny Fish Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies (Dr. Shay Pilnik, director) and the Dr. Lillian & Dr. Rebecca Chutick Law Library (Ingrid Mattson, Law Library Associate Dean) of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law that made this acquisition possible.

For Dr. Shay Pilnik, director of the Fish Center, “the mission of the Fish Center is to train the next generation of educators and leaders in the field of Holocaust education, and I cannot think of an educational tool better than the Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive to impart the message that Holocaust education is a critical subject for the here and now. What six million Jews means is one Jew—an entire universe—six million times.”

Paul Glassman, director of scholarly and cultural resources at Yeshiva University, is also understandably excited by the addition of the Archive to the University’s resources. “I am thrilled that we’re able to provide a resource that faculty and students have been requesting since my association with the University Libraries began in 2015,” he observed. “Yeshiva University researchers will benefit from the robust search function the Archive provides for its 114,000 hours of testimony. Equally impressive is the universal approach the Archive takes to helping us understand the persistent threat of genocide around the world.”

Jocelyn Getgen Kestenbaum, associate professor of clinical law at Cardozo Law School and director of the Benjamin B. Ferencz Human Rights and Atrocity Prevention Clinic and the Cardozo Law Institute in Holocaust and Human Rights, observed that “it is important when we come together to remember the Holocaust, that we center survivors’ voices and keep alive their narratives. The Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive is a crucial resource so that the world can never forget, and so that we might begin to build a world where ‘Never Again!’ rings true.”

Dr. Joshua Zimmerman, a professor of history and Eli and Diana Zborowski Professorial Chair in Holocaust Studies and East European Jewish History at Yeshiva University, noted that the Archive “is an indispensable source for researchers and students [and] will be for many years to come the central site for anyone interested in exploring the history of the Holocaust and Jewish life in Europe before the war.”

Find out more information about the Archive and the Foundation.