CEU Hosts Workshop on Using Holocaust Testimonies in Teaching

This week CEU’s Curriculum Resource Center (CRC) is hosting a workshop for international academics on ways to teach Jewish history using the USC Visual History Archive of the Shoah Foundation, a database of 52,000 Holocaust survivor interviews now available through the CEU Library.

The week-long series, organized jointly through the Jewish Studies Program and the Department of Gender Studies, brings together nine social sciences teachers from universities in Austria, Georgia, Hungary and Poland to discuss how the database can be used to design university courses and to enhance Jewish Studies curricula.

Established by Steven Spielberg in 1994, the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive is one of the largest video digital libraries of Holocaust testimonials in the world. CEU Library became the first institution in the Central and Eastern Europe to offer access the Los Angeles-based archive, after partnering with USC to install an IT link to the database in May 2009. Prior to that, European researchers could access the database only in London and Berlin. A link to the database was also installed this January at the Charles University in Prague.

Among the workshop's highlights this week are two courses, “Memory and the Holocaust,” and “The Practicalities of Doing Oral History,” taught by Andrea Peto, Gender Studies professor who specializes in oral history. Other sessions include an introduction to the Visual History Archive by Andrea Szőnyi, regional consultant for Shoah Foundation.