Shoah Foundation Revamps Web Site for Educators
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Joan Oleck -- School Library Journal, 11/27/2007
For librarians who want to teach about the Holocaust, the Shoah Foundation Institute has streamlined its Web site, adding easily accessible lesson plans and video clips of survivors and witnesses.
The free site, based at the University of Southern California (USC) at Los Angeles, draws its video clips from 52,000 first-person video testimonies in 32 languages and from 56 countries. Until now, the Web site's features were limited, and the often-lengthy testimonies were held in an archive accessible only at specific broadband-enhanced university, public library, and museum sites.
"The main thing is we're making things available for educators now," explains Sonya Sharp, marketing and distribution specialist for the institute (whose formal name is the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education).
The institute—which houses the largest visual history archive in the world—interviewed Jewish, homosexual, Jehovah's Witness, Roma (Gypsies), and other Holocaust survivors, as well as political prisoners, liberators, and war trial participants.
Douglas Greenberg, executive director of the institute, says the new site is more than a portal to information about the institute. “It should be a destination where educators can find resources for their classrooms; where researchers and scholars can further their academic pursuits.”
Now, says Sharp, educators can access a large amount of student-friendly material—for kids ages 14 and up—which screens out any gruesome visual images of the death camps while preserving the survivors' dramatic oral accounts.
One feature, Segments for the Classroom, offers teachers seven downloadable video clips, six in English, one in Spanish, with excerpts of testimony from the institute's Visual History Archive categorized into subject areas such as the Holocaust through the eyes of child survivors, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising; and "Surviving Auschwitz-Birkenau," the most infamous of the death camps.
Another feature, a Testimony Catalogue, allows users to search out biographical information about a relative or person from a specific category such as a survivor of Auschwitz or a political prisoner. Also available are interactive exhibits, including one that follows the stories of Auschwitz survivors from different countries.
