Yale Bulletin and Calendar

October 26, 2007|Volume 36, Number 8

Conference will commemorate
25 years of Holocaust archives

An archive at Yale that has collected the personal stories of over 4,000 Holocaust survivors over the past quarter century will mark its milestone anniversary with a conference titled “Testimony Across the Disciplines: 25 Years at Yale” on Sunday, Nov. 4.

Sponsored by the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, the conference will take place in Rm. 102, Linsly-Chittenden Hall, 63 High St. It is free and open to the public.

The speakers at the conference will explore topics ranging from “Testimonies as Historical Evidence: Reconstructing the Holocaust from Below” to “Survivor Testimony in Nazi Criminal Trials: Lessons from the Fortunoff Video Archive” to “Psychological Responses to the Holocaust,” and more. The full program can be found online at www.library.yale.edu/testimonies.

The event will begin at 9 a.m. with welcoming remarks by Geoffrey Hartman, a founder of the Video Archive of Holocaust Testimonies and Sterling Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature, and Alice Prochaska, University librarian.

The Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, founded in 1982, is dedicated to the recording, collection and preservation of videotaped oral testimonies of survivors and witnesses. The archive holds more than 4,400 testimonies comprising over 12,000 hours of videotape, which were recorded in cooperation with 37 affiliate projects in North America, South America, Europe, Israel and the former Soviet Union. The archive serves as a resource for students, scholars, museums and educational associations; catalogues its testimonies to make them intellectually accessible; and lends programs of testimony excerpts to educators, schools, museums and community groups.

The archive came into being through the efforts of a grassroots organization called the Holocaust Survivors Film Project, initiated by local television interviewer and producer Laurel Vlock in association with Dori Laub, associate professor of clinical psychiatry at Yale and a child survivor of the Holocaust himself.

In 1979 organizers began videotaping testimony from survivors and witnesses in the New Haven area. The archive now includes first-hand testimonies from survivors, bystanders and rescuers as well as those involved in the Nazi resistance and liberation efforts. When project organizers decided to expand the scope of the project to include testimonies from across the nation, one of their board members — Hartman — urged the University to assist the project.

In 1981, the collection, which then numbered some 200 testimonies, came to the Sterling Memorial Library. A grant from the Charles H. Revson Foundation supported the transfer and cataloguing of the testimonies, and made it possible for Yale to extend the collection’s reach to a national and international level. The archive became accessible to the public in 1982, and in 1987, the late Alan M. Fortunoff, president of Fortunoff specialty stores, provided endowment funding.

The 25th anniversary conference was made possible by a grant from the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund and by support from Yale’s Judaic Studies Program. Joanne Rudof, archivist at the Fortunoff Video Archive, is coordinator of the conference.

Additional support was provided by the John K. Castle Fund of the Program for Ethics, Politics and Economics, Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale, the Orville H. Schell Jr. Center for International Human Rights of the Yale Law School, the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, and the Jewish Federation of Greater New Haven.

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