Dr. Michael Berenbaum to Join Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation

Steven Spielberg, Founder and Chairman of Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, and Foundation Directors James Moll and June Beallor, announced today that Dr. Michael Berenbaum will join Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation in early January 1997 as President and CEO.

Berenbaum joins the Foundation after nearly two decades at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where he served as Project Director for the creation of the Museum and, since its opening in 1993, as Director of the Museum's Research Institute. The USHMM is one of the Shoah Foundation's five initial repositories, and the Foundation has been working closely with Dr. Berenbaum since the project's inception. The author of eleven books, Berenbaum is also the Hymen Goldman Professor of Theology at Georgetown University.

"Dr. Berenbaum's background as an educator and scholar makes him the ideal choice to spearhead the educational distribution of the archive and further the Foundation's mission over the next few critical years," said Mr. Spielberg.

"Michael brings a lifetime of experience working in the field of Holocaust studies, and we are thrilled and honored to have him on board," says Beallor. Moll added, "we will be working with Michael to continue developing tolerance and Holocaust studies curricula and pave the way for the Foundation to serve as a model for visual history archives on other subjects."

The Shoah Foundation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to videotaping and preserving interviews of Holocaust survivors all over the world. Working with the world's leading Holocaust museums, educators, archivists, documentary filmmakers and with Holocaust survivors, the Foundation is compiling the most comprehensive library of firsthand survivor testimonies ever assembled. The archive will be used as a tool for global education about the Holocaust and to teach racial, ethnic, and cultural tolerance. The initial five Shoah Foundation repositories are Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C., the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, the Fortunoff Video Archive at Yale University, New Haven, and the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City.