— The new Museum installation and web resource will leverage A.I. technology for a collective storytelling project with ten Holocaust survivors —
(New York, NY)—In November 2024, New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust will launch a new video installation and web resource titled Survivor Stories: An Interactive Dialog.
The project, conceived of and produced in partnership with the USC Shoah Foundation and USC Libraries, will feature testimonies from ten Holocaust survivors based in the New York metro area— all of them members of the Museum’s Speakers Bureau.
The participating survivors, who were all children during the Holocaust, now range in age from 89 to an impressive 98 years-old (nine of the ten are now in their 90s). They belong to the very last generation of Holocaust survivors, which is rapidly diminishing.
The ten survivors were filmed at the Museum earlier this summer answering an extensive list of interview questions that were developed by the partnering institutions and informed by the questions most frequently posed by students and teachers when meeting with survivors and Holocaust educators.
These recorded interviews will form the basis of the new, high-tech experience, which will enable Museum visitors and website users to ask questions and receive corresponding video answers from the survivors.
Inspired by the USC Shoah Foundation’s original Dimensions in Testimony and building on the interactive experience featured in Survivor Stories: An Interactive Dialog will fuse Artificial Intelligence (or A.I.) with oral history, facilitating an immersive experience of conversation. Crucially, it does not make use of generative AI. The technology will not interpret, imagine, manipulate, nor generate new or composite responses. Rather, in response to natural language with speech-to-text input, the AI will match and play back a previously-recorded video answer from a real survivor, unedited, to each question visitors ask.
Different from Dimensions in Testimony, the new Survivor Stories: An Interactive Dialog shifts from a focus on one individual’s testimony to a new, collective storytelling effort. Museum and website visitors will engage with the group of survivors to experience the breadth and diversity of survivors’ experiences—learning more about the vast scope of the Holocaust’s impact from the poignancy of firsthand accounts.
Visitors to the Museum will be able to engage with the installation’s large, interactive screens on-site. In addition, classroom teachers and students, researchers, and others outside of New York will be able to experience Survivor Stories: An Interactive Dialog remotely via an interactive website that is also launching this fall.
“We are thrilled to partner with the visionary teams at USC Libraries and the USC Shoah Foundation to innovate new ways to educate generations to come about Jewish life before, during, and after the Holocaust,” says Jack Kliger, President and CEO of the Museum of Jewish Heritage. “Survivors have been the Museum’s North Star since its founding, and we are determined to preserve their testimonies well into the future, along with the lessons they impart.”
“Our Speakers Bureau has played an essential role in the Museum’s mission to educate students about the Holocaust. Meeting a survivor and hearing from that person a firsthand account of lived experience has a profound impact on young people. It helps develop their sense of empathy and a deeper level of knowing like no history book can,” says Dr. Paul Radensky, Senior Director for Education at the Museum of Jewish Heritage.
“In our ten years of experience with interactive biographies, we have seen users absorb history while engaging in meaningful conversations with survivors,” said Catherine Clark, PhD, Senior Director of Programs at the USC Shoah Foundation. “This innovative partnership with the Museum of Jewish Heritage will keep these connections alive now and into the future.”
“It is especially meaningful for the USC Libraries and the USC Shoah Foundation to collaborate with the Museum of Jewish Heritage on such a thoughtful approach to collective storytelling,” said Sam Gustman, Associate Dean of Technology at the USC Libraries and Chief Technology Officer and Senior Director of Collections at the USC Shoah Foundation. “The exhibit preserves the singular voices of our last generation of survivors in a way that sets each of them apart while conveying the enormity of their shared experiences.”
Leading support for Survivor Stories: An Interactive Dialog is provided by The Myron and Alayne Meilman Family Foundation.
About The Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust
The Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust is New York’s contribution to the global responsibility to Never Forget. Opened in 1997, the Museum is committed to the crucial mission of educating diverse visitors about Jewish life before, during, and after the Holocaust.
The Museum’s current offerings include Courage to Act: Rescue in Denmark,a new exhibition about the extraordinary rescue of Denmark’s Jewish population in 1943, a story of mutual aid and communal upstanding in difficult times for visitors aged 9 and up; and The Holocaust: What Hate Can Do, a major exhibition offering a timely and expansive presentation of Holocaust history, on view in the main galleries.
The Museum of Jewish Heritage maintains the Peter & Mary Kalikow Jewish Genealogy Resource Center, a collection of almost 40,000 artifacts, photographs, documentary films, and survivor testimonies, and contains classrooms, a 375-seat theater (Edmond J. Safra Hall), special exhibition galleries, and a memorial art installation, Garden of Stones, designed by internationally acclaimed sculptor Andy Goldsworthy. The Museum also hosts LOX at Café Bergson an OU-certified café serving eastern European specialties.
Each year, the Museum presents over 100 public programs, connecting our community in person and virtually through lectures, book talks, concerts, and more. For more info visit: http://mjhnyc.org/events. The Museum receives general operating support from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and New York State Council on the Arts. For more information, visit mjhnyc.org.
About the USC Shoah Foundation
The USC Shoah Foundation preserves and amplifies the voices of the past to build a future that remembers. The Visual History Archive is home to more than 57,000 testimonies of survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust, contemporary antisemitism, the Armenian Genocide, and other historical events of genocide, crimes against humanity, and related persecution. It is the largest such collection in the world.
Established in 1994, the USC Shoah Foundation found a permanent home at the University of Southern California in 2006. With survivor testimony at the center, the USC Shoah Foundation’s innovative programming, global-impact strategies, and forward-looking research initiatives help foster insights and practical solutions to preserve Holocaust memory and history, confront antisemitism, and strengthen democratic values.
About the USC Libraries
The USC Libraries actively support the discovery, creation, and preservation of knowledge at the University of Southern California and beyond. Since the early 1990s, the USC Libraries have pioneered digital technologies for engagement with and preservation of cultural heritage collections. Our initiatives include immersive digital media projects across many areas of inquiry, media partnerships with PBS SoCal and other organizations, and innovative uses of machine learning technologies for the interpretation of cultural collections.
Our USC Digital Repository plays a leading role in these efforts—particularly through its development of natural language processing and conversational AI approaches for creating thoughtful, interactive experiences with witnesses to history that ensure trust and accuracy. Our collaborations in this area include innovative projects with the Museum of Jewish Heritage, the Television Academy Foundation, the USC Shoah Foundation, the USC Charlotta Bass Journalism & Justice Lab at the USC Annenberg School for Communication, and other organizations.