The Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive at the University of Michigan-Dearborn has received a third $25,000 grant from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany to assist with the transcription of the archive's recorded interviews with survivors.
"The support that the Archive has received from the Claims Conference in the last few years has enabled us to make great strides toward fulfilling our mission and vision. We have been able to transcribe, digitize and catalog the bulk of the interviews in our collection," said Jamie Wraight, curator and historian of the Archive. "Furthermore, we have been able to expand our outreach initiatives by developing educational and public programs that utilize the interviews. It also has allowed us to enhance our website, which now contains special sections for educators and links to some of our special collections."
Since 1951, the Claims Conference has pursued compensation from Germany for Jewish victims of the Holocaust. In the past decade, the Claims Conference has allocated approximately $900 million to organizations and institutions that provide assistance to elderly, needy Jewish victims of Nazism or engage in research, education, and documentation of the Shoah.
The UM-Dearborn grant is from the Claims Conference's Rabbi Israel Miller Fund for Shoah Research, Documentation and Education.
UM-Dearborn's Voice/Vision Archive currently contains nearly 250 taped interviews with Holocaust survivors from around the world and 150 of them have been transcribed. The Claims Conference grant allows the archive to increase the number of interviews transcribed each year from around 15 to 24.
The interview transcripts are available for use through interlibrary loan, the archive's Web site at http://holocaust.umd.umich.edu and various community outreach activities.
The shortest interview in the Archive is 18 pages, with the longest to date coming in at 350 pages.
For more information about the Voice/Vision Archive, visit http://holocaust.umd.umich.edu/.
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