In recent decades, enormous efforts have been made to gather the testimonies of the last living Holocaust survivors. The challenge we face today is attending to all those thousands of human stories, which despite being safely stored in archives, may nevertheless disappear into oblivion. The challenge is at once ethical and technological: how to listen to thousands of testimonies as an integral body of voices and stories rather than a collection of fragmentary items in a database.

Join us on campus or on Zoom on March 28, 2023 at 4:30 PM PST for this special public convening featuring a keynote by distinguished scholar Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, in recognition of the Mickey Shapiro Endowed Chair in Holocaust Education Research at the University of Southern California. The event will be moderated by Dr. Ishwar K. Puri.

In this presentation, Elyse Semerdjian will outline the earliest Armenian pilgrimages to the killing fields of Dayr al-Zur in the Syrian Desert. It is there that Armenians interacted with the remains of Armenians murdered during the Armenian Genocide (1915-1918) in acts of remembrance. Semerdjian will discuss the origins of the now-destroyed Armenian Genocide Memorial in Dayr al-Zur and the ritual and collection habits of pilgrims that enact what she calls bone memory.