Salon Jewish Studies Blog

The project holocaust.cz (English short version available) developed by the Terezin Initiative Institute aims to provide information on the history of the Holocaust (and related information) to the Czech public, including interviews with survivors, documents and texts. holocaust.cz was especially designed for use in Czech schools with the focus on the history of the "Final Solution" in Czech Lands and of the Terezin Ghetto.

CENTROPA bills itself as "[t]he first oral history project that combines old family pictures with the stories that go with them, Centropa has interviewed more than 1,350 elderly Jews living in Central and Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and the Sephardic communities of Greece, Turkey and the Balkans. With a database of 25,000 digitized images, [they] are bringing Jewish history to life in ways never done before. (comprehensive information on the project can also be found in Speelbound Blog - Preserving Jewish Memory: Family Photos Join Oral History in Centropa Movies)
Centropa also includes a film database called THE LIBRARY OF RESCUED MEMORIES - "[a]n ever-expanding library of short biographical films, each based on our interviews and family pictures". At the moment twenty stories can be viewed online.

Check out a further seven ONLINE ORAL HISTORY COLLECTIONS on Salon Jewish Studies!

On Thursday the online archive Forced Labor 1939-1945 - Memory and History (only English homepage) was presented for the first time to the public. The project is a cooperation between the Freie Universität Berlin, the German Historical Museum and the Foundation "Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft" (Remembrance, Responsibility and Future). It is dedicated to over 12 Mio persons who had been forced to work for Nazi-Germany during WWII.
The archive provides access to 590 (192 video, 398 audio) interviews with 590 eyewitnesses from 26 countries. In addition to the interviews you will find transcripts, personal documents and photographs in the digital archive.
The access to the archive is restricted to (especially) pupils, students, scholars, research centers and further public institutions. ( For more information, please check the disclaimer [German only]). For further press material (English & German) click here.

Voices on Antisemitsm is a podcast series, hosted by the U. S. Holcaust Memorial Museum Washington. It represents a wide range of perspectives about antisemitism nowadays.

Recovering Jewish daily Life in the Soviet Union before the Holocaust is an oral history project by Zvi Gitelman (Professor of Political Science, Preston Tisch Professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan) and Anna Shternshis (Al and Malka Green Assistant Professor of Yiddish Language and Literatures at University of Toronto. It "was designed to uncover and preserve the unique cultural heritage of Soviet Jews on the eve of Holocaust and to collect unique and irretrievable source material" (source: sovietjewishculture.org). Altogehter more than 500 interviews with people from Russia, Ukraine and Byelorussa were recorded during 1999 and 2007. Ten transcribed oral histories (PDF) as well as a bibliography of selected books and films can be found online.