Holocaust Collection

The Sydney Jewish Museum’s Resource Centre has more than 6,000 volumes, audio and videotapes, journals and personal testimonies including the Shoah Testimonies. As well as providing background material on the themes of the permanent exhibitions, the Resource Centre’s collection includes numerous texts examining: Antisemitism, War Crimes Trials, Holocaust & Art, Holocaust in Literature, German History, Australian Jewish History.

The Centre houses the Survivors Registry and contains resources which members of the public may use to determine the fate of Holocaust victims or survivors. The Librarian can provide general guidelines for using these sources and conducting further research.

The Centre holds over 2,500 testimonies from Holocaust survivors interviewed in Australia. These testimonies are part of a collection of more than 53,000 testimonies gathered by the Shoah Foundation, spearheaded by Steven Spielberg. The individual testimonies have been digitised and are housed at the USC Shoah Foundation (University of Southern California).

Visitors to the Museum are able to conduct searches using an extensive index of geographic and experiential keywords (nearly 10,000 keywords), names of people mentioned in the testimonies (over 50,000 names) and biographical information for each interviewee.