Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies
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History
In 1979, a grassroots organization, the Holocaust Survivors Film Project, began videotaping Holocaust survivors and witnesses in New Haven, Connecticut. In 1981, the original collection of testimonies was deposited at Yale University, and the Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies opened its doors to the public the following year (for a more detailed history of the collection see A Yale University and New Haven Community Project: From Local to Global). Since then, the Fortunoff Archive has worked to record, collect, and preserve Holocaust witness testimonies, and to make its collection available to researchers, educators, and the general public.
The Fortunoff Archive currently holds more than 4,400 testimonies, which are comprised of over 10,000 recorded hours of videotape. Testimonies were produced in cooperation with 37 affiliated projects across North America, South America, Europe, and Israel, and each project maintains a duplicate collection of locally recorded videotapes.
The Fortunoff Archive and its affiliates recorded the testimonies of willing individuals with first-hand experience of the Nazi persecutions, including those in hiding, survivors, bystanders, resistants, and liberators. Testimonies are recorded in whatever language the witness prefers, and range in length from one-half hour to over 40 hours (recorded over several sessions).
A group of interviewers in the New Haven area completed an eight-week training course in 1984, and continue to attend workshops. Training includes lectures by historians, required readings, critical viewing of testimonies, and in-depth discussion of our interviewing methodology, with the goal of teaching the interviewers to be empathic and highly informed listeners. Fortunoff Archive representatives supervised and conducted the training at the affiliate project.
Fortunoff Archive's interviewing methodology stresses the leadership role of the witness in structuring and telling his or her own story. Questions are primarily used to ascertain time and place, or elicit additional information about topics already mentioned, with an emphasis on open-ended questions that give the initiative to the witness. The witnesses are the experts in their own life story, and the interviewers are there to listen, to learn, and to clarify.
The testimonies are cataloged in Yale’s online public access catalog and in OCLC, in an international bibliographic database. Each recording is indexed by geographic names and topics discussed during the interview, and keyword searches can be combined to locate specific witness profiles.
The Fortunoff Archive serves as a resource for other projects working to record witnesses to the Holocaust and other twentieth-century genocides. The Fortunoff Archive consults for a variety of Holocaust-related organizations, including the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Museum of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, the Bergen Belsen Memorial and Museum, and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. The Video Archive has worked with organizations concerned with documenting genocides in Armenia, Bosnia, and Cambodia, and with Japanese-Americans interned in the United States during World War II. The Archive has advised these groups on matters including confidentiality and legal issues, pre-interview procedures, interviewing techniques and the taping environment, and cataloging methods.
Administrative Structure
The Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies is a collection within Yale University Library's Department of Manuscripts and Archives: http://web.library.yale.edu/mssa
Archival and Other Holdings
More than 4,500 videotestimonies of Holocaust survivors, witnesses, and bystanders encompassing circa 12,000 hours of recorded material. The testimonies were recorded between 1979 and the present by the Fortunoff Archive and its affiliate projects in more than a dozen countries and languages.
Finding Aids, Guides, and Publication
Every testimony in the collection has a bibliographic record with Library of Congress subject headings and a circa 200 word summary. Those records can be searched in Yale University Library's discovery tools Quicksearch or Orbis. For more information see: http://web.library.yale.edu/testimonies/research/findandrequest
Opening Times
The Fortunoff Video Archive is a collection within Yale Library's Manuscripts and Archives Department (MSSA). The Fortunoff Archive's staff is generally available between 8:40 AM and 4:45 PM EST Monday through Friday. Testimonies can be viewed at the Manuscripts and Archives Reading room in Yale's Sterling Memorial Library (for exact information on Reading Room hours see: http://web.library.yale.edu/mssa/hours ), or at the Fortunoff Archive's partner sites worldwide. For more information on where those partner sites are located, see: http://web.library.yale.edu/testimonies/visit/partner-sites.
Conditions of Access
Testimonies must be located and requested in advance of a research visit. For instructions on how to search and request testimonies for viewing at Yale Library's Manuscripts and Archives, or one of Fortunoff's partner sites, see: http://web.library.yale.edu/testimonies/research/findandrequest.
Permission to view testimonies is not the same as permission to publish or reuse testimonies. Researchers must contact the Fortunoff Archive and request authorization to publish quotations or data from the testimonies prior to any publication.
Other Connected Items
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Since 2021, the AUTh Library & Information Center in collaboration with the Yale University Library's Department of Manuscripts and Archives offers the AUTh academic community permanent, online access to the collection of oral testimonies of the Yale Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies.