USC Shoah Foundation Adds Nearly 2,000 New Testimonies

With the addition of the Armenian Film Foundation collection and Jewish Family and Children’s Services of San Francisco (JFCS)’s collection of Holocaust testimonies, USC Shoah Foundation now has 53,583 testimonies of genocide survivors and witnesses.

In April, the Armenian Film Foundation officially handed over 377 digitized testimonies recorded by J. Michael Hagopian to be cataloged and indexed in USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive. The testimonies were recorded between 1975 and 2005, when the survivors were in their 70s and 80s. The first testimonies from the collection will be integrated into the Visual History Archive by April 2015, the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide.

The new collection also raises the number of countries and languages represented in USC Shoah Foundation’s testimonies. With the addition of Armenia, Lebanon and Syria, USC Shoah Foundation now has testimonies from 61 countries, and it has 39 languages, which now include Arabic, Armenian, Kurdish and Turkish.

USC Shoah Foundation acquired 1,409 testimonies of Holocaust survivors from JFCS in January. The testimonies were collected in a variety of audiovisual formats since 1980, after the establishment of the Holocaust Center of Northern California. The collection is currently being indexed, with the goal of having the entire collection indexed and catalogued in the Visual History Archive by the end of 2015.