Reconsidering Representations of the Holocaust - Digital Curation, Evidence and Remembrance Through the Visual History of the Holocaust (VHH) Project

October 12, 2021

With the creation of new online interactive tools, the project re-evaluates the filmed history of the Holocaust, based on a comprehensive mapping, contextualization, and reframing of film documents recorded by Allied troops during and subsequent to the liberation of Nazi concentration camps at the end of World War II. We develop new methods in digital curation by dynamically linking the filmic records with photographs, text documents, and oral histories in order to unlock layers of context and meaning inaccessible through traditional linear narratives.

Funded by the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 program, the project brings together 12 consortium members and 3 associated partners—including institutions from Europe, Israel, and the United States—with content providers from the UK, Russia, Belarus, the Ukraine, and the Baltics. Participants in the project bring knowledge, state-of-the-art concepts and practices from information science, museum pedagogy and digital storytelling in order to design a new approach for the engagement with the Holocaust. Digitized film and media collections are entered into a new system designed to allow for participatory forms of user interaction and enabling users’ engagement and co-creation. This project brings critical awareness for the use of imagery about mass murder by implementing an ethics guideline and general principles of digital curation of filmic records and contextual documents related to the Holocaust.

VHH project homepage»

Non-Governmental Organizations (Rescue/Relief) During and Immediately after WWII

October 12, 2021

This panel focuses on four different non-governmental agencies which provided relief and rescue for refugees during the Holocaust: the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), American Friends Service Committee, American Jewish Committee, and the Hebrew Committee of National Liberation.

Researchers and archivists will discuss how and where materials can be accessed and how these specific materials have been used in existing research projects. These presentations will explore questions and themes such as: coordination and conflict between organizations, the benefits of using the records of multiple aid groups, the unique materials provided by each organization, and organizational stances in relation to Zionism and anti-Zionism, especially in the post-war period.

Paper Titles and Presenters

Refugee Assistance Case Files: New Sources, New Approaches, New Stories (American Friends Service Committee)
Ron Coleman
Chief of Library (Acting), United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
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A Unique Chapter: JDC and the War Refugee Board
Isabelle Rohr
Manager of Academic Programs and Outreach, JDC Archives (American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee)
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Exploring Jewish Postwar Visions during the Holocaust: The Case of the American Jewish Committee
Ludwig Decke
PhD student, Department of History, University of Wisconsin-Madison
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The Hebrew Committee of National Liberation: from Rescue to Post-Zionism
Roman Vater
Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge
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The Relationship of the Materials in the FDR Library’s Morgenthau Holocaust Collections Project to NGOs providing relief and rescue
Abby Gondek
Morgenthau Scholar in Residence, FDR Presidential Library and Museum and Roosevelt Institute

Moderator
Anat Kutner
Director, JDC Jerusalem Archives

American Responses: USHMM Resources, JDC Archives

October 12, 2021

In this panel, representatives from the USHMM and the JDC Archives will provide an overview of the materials they have available for various audiences related to American responses to the Holocaust and how those materials can be accessed digitally/virtually.

Each presenter will describe what makes their institution unique but also where there is overlap with the holdings of other organizations. They will illustrate the different audiences that their institution serves and how they make records accessible to these different audiences. Finally, they will provide case studies of how these specific audiences have accessed records virtually/digitally. After the instructional presentations, the panel will transition into a “roundtable” format in which other specialists from the USHMM and the JDC Archives will join to answer questions related to accessibility, education, digitization, digital technologies and digital humanities (like machine learning, AI, datafication of archival materials, collections-as-data). This “roundtable” will be a conversation between panelists and also between panelists and audience members. A central conversation topic will be collaboration between US based archives that hold Holocaust materials and how to better digitally connect the materials at different institutions. For example, connections with YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, and also with smaller refugee aid groups and synagogues will be discussed. Representatives from the USHMM will elaborate on their efforts to collect materials from organizations such as: HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society), NCJW (National Council of Jewish Women), and the National Refugee Service.

Paper Titles and Presenters

American Responses to the Holocaust: Sources and Digital Possibilities for the National Institute for Holocaust Documentation at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Ron Coleman
Chief of Library (Acting), United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Zack Levine
Director of Archival and Curatorial Affairs, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
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How the JDC Archives Presents Holocaust-Related Content
Linda Levi
Executive Director of JDC Archives, American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee
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Moderator
Avinoam Patt
Doris and Simon Konover Chair of Judaic Studies and Director of the Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life at the University of Connecticut
Joining during roundtable portion:
Jeff Edelstein, Manager of Digital Initiatives, JDC Archives
Dr. Diane Afoumado, Director, Holocaust Survivors and Victims Resource Center, USHMM
Kassandra LaPrade-Seuthe, Collection Curator, USHMM

Myths and Realities of American Responses to the Holocaust, 1938-1945

October 12, 2021

Public understanding of American response(s) to the Holocaust is rife with myths and misconceptions, from the idea that the American public had no access to information about the Holocaust to the belief that the United States government willfully ignored mass murder as it was happening. In this roundtable, three scholars of American history will debate and discuss some of these myths, as well as welcoming audience questions for discussion. The historians will also provide brief presentations addressing myths that their research has helped to dispel. Richard Breitman, professor emeritus at American University and author of numerous books including FDR and the Jews and The Berlin Mission, will discuss the American government's reaction to the Kristallnacht attacks of 1938, arguing that the FDR administration's reaction was stronger than most believe. Rebecca Erbelding, historian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and author of Rescue Board, will examine the physical realties of Jewish immigration and the dramatic effect of World War II on the opportunities of refugees to escape. Meredith Hindley, the author of Destination Casablanca, will explore the case study of Casablanca as a locus for the Jewish refugee community following the German invasion of France in 1940.

Paper Titles and Presenters

U.S. Reaction to Kristallnacht Now and Then
Richard Breitman
Emeritus Professor, American University
“The Last Boat:” The Impact of the Encroaching War on Refugee Immigration to the United States, 1938-1941
Rebecca Erbelding
Curator/Archivist, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Everybody Comes to Casablanca
Meredith Hindley
Historian
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Moderator
Barry Trachtenberg
Rubin Presidential Chair of Jewish History and Director of Jewish Studies Program, Wake Forest University

Soul Witness: Film Screening and Q&A with the Director, R. Harvey Bravman

October 12, 2021

Soul Witness is a documentary film based on more than 80 hours of Holocaust testimonies conducted 30 years ago by Holocaust testimony expert, Lawrence Langer. The interview tapes sat in a metal closet for decades before being rescued for the making of this film. Survivors describe their lives before the war, growing intolerance; their lives during the war and the effect their experiences still had on them at the time of the interviews. Some witnesses survived death camps, some hid, others fought in resistance movements and many saved the lives of others.

Moderator:
Bill Harris
Deputy Director, FDR Library

Speaker:
R. Harvey Bravman, Producer/Director

What Did We Know? A Model for Learning through Crowd-Sourced Historical Newspaper Research

October 13, 2021

By engaging the public in the process of original historical newspaper research, History Unfolded, confronts the myth that Americans “knew nothing” and allows citizen historians to add to existing research on the topic, forcing an examination of the gap between what information was available, what people knew, and what actions may have been possible.

Presenters

David Klevan
Education Outreach Specialist, US Holocaust Memorial Museum
Eric Schmalz
Citizen History Community Manager, US Holocaust Memorial Museum
Jennifer Goss
Curriculum and Instruction Specialist, Echoes and Reflections

Moderator
Daniel Greene
President, Librarian, Newberry Library
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Forced Academic Migration of Refugee Scholars

October 13, 2021

This panel is made up of two groups of scholars who are working on the topic of forced academic migration of refugee scholars using digital technologies (such as nodegoat) to visualize geographic, chronological and biographical trajectories of migration.
Content-based thematic intersections between the two projects include: individual and comparative biographies of refugee scholars based on different national contexts and multiple migrations, the impact of gender on the refugee scholar experience, the different outcomes for those who managed to escape Europe, and the reasons for acceptance or rejection from Swiss and U.S. universities.
Some of the overlapping themes related to methodological concerns include: accessing sources (archival or digital), lack of digitization of archival materials, creating databases, inputting data on a large scale, collaboration with multiple partners to create databases and visualizations, how to visualize data geographically, chronologically, and biographically, the constraints of working with large datasets, and the benefits of case studies focusing on smaller datasets.
The digital technologies utilized enable the visualization of individual histories as well as the social, institutional, national, transnational, and historical context in which these scholars were forced to migrate.
These projects highlight the vulnerable place of scholars within repressive or conflict-torn societies, and thus provide powerful, contemporary lessons for human rights efforts and asylum and immigration policies.

Project websites can be accessed here:
https://forced-academic-migration.net/
https://www.northeastern.edu/refugeescholars/home

Paper titles and Presenters

Forced Academic Migration (FAM) – A Digital Approach
FAM.online
Stefanie Mahrer
SNF-PRIMA Professor for Modern European, Swiss, and Jewish History University of Bern, Switzerland
The Role of Aid Organizations in the Migration of Refugee Academics to the US
Sinja Clavadetscher
PhD Student, University of Bern, Switzerland
Germany, Switzerland, USA – Patterns of Multiple Migration of Expelled Jewish Academics
Stefanie Salvisberg
PhD student, University of Bern, Switzerland
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Rediscovering Refugee Scholars
Laurel Leff
Professor of Journalism/Associate Director of Jewish Studies, Northeastern University
John Wihbey
Associate Professor, School of Journalism, Northeastern University
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Moderator
Rachel Deblinger
Director, Modern Endangered Archives Program, UCLA Library

Bridging Micro and Macro Geographic Histories of the Holocaust with Digital Technologies (Geographic Information Systems and Computational Linguistics)

October 13, 2021

The Holocaust Ghettos Project (part of the Holocaust Geographies Collaborative) utilizes a geographic technology called GIS as well as corpus and computational linguistics to integrate individual and large-scale Holocaust histories, including victim and perpetrator experiences. The project uses a large body of survivor testimonies as well as an encyclopedia of Holocaust ghettos and camps.

Paper Titles and Presenters

Geographies of Ghettoization: Using Digital Methods to Place Victims’ Experiences
Anne Kelly Knowles
Colonel James C. McBride Distinguished Professor of History, University of Maine
Dan Miller
Researcher, Designer, Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation
Using GIS to Model Hiding Places in the Holocaust
Maja Kruse
Interdisciplinary PhD candidate, University of Maine
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Moderator
Rachel Deblinger
Director, Modern Endangered Archives Program, UCLA Library

The Last Mission – FDR, Ibn Saud and the Question of Israel

October 13, 2021

FDR’s interest in Palestine constitutes one aspect of his long-standing and controversial relationship with the Jews. His harshest critics have assailed him for not doing more to help German Jewish refugees escape persecution; some even accuse him and his administration of complicity in the Holocaust. Whatever his failures on the question of Jewish immigration to America, FDR took an active interest in the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. This brought the president head-to-head with the British government.

Presenters
David Woolner
Professor, Senior Fellow, Marist College, Roosevelt Institute
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Moderator
Paul Sparrow
Director, FDR Presidential Library and Museum

New Intersections – Holocaust Studies & Digital Humanities

October 14, 2021

Co-moderated by two USHMM Directors: the Director of Future Projects and the Director of Digital Assets Management and Preservation, the panel comprised of a Holocaust Studies Scholar, Digital Archives Specialists, and Technologists, will introduce new directions of digital scholarship in Holocaust Studies that have the potential to significantly improve researcher access.
We will introduce concepts behind computational technologies and illustrate them with concrete examples from the Morgenthau Diaries Collection. These include Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Digital Curation, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP), Crowdsourcing, Machine Learning (ML), Document type recognition, Faceted search, Scholarly editing, and Linking content across the web. The panel is both standalone and serves as an introduction to a more detailed interactive workshop in the afternoon.

Panel Members
Richard Marciano
Director, Advanced Information Collaboratory (AIC), University of Maryland
William Underwood
Research Scientist, Advanced Information Collaboratory (AIC), University of Maryland
Teddy Randby
Research Fellow, Advanced Information Collaboratory, University North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Abby Gondek
Morgenthau Scholar-in-Residence, Roosevelt Institute, FDR Presidential Library and Museum

Moderators
Michael Haley Goldman
Executive Director, New Hampshire Humanities; formerly Director of Future Projects, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Michael R. Levy
Director Digital Assets Management and Preservation, National Institute for Holocaust Documentation, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Geographies of Survival: Digital Accessibility

October 14, 2021

This interactive tutorial/workshop will explore themes of digital accessibility to source materials for the public and researchers. These three projects geographically map the trajectories and social networks of objects and people during and after the Holocaust and explore transnational migrations but also local experiences. The first and third tutorials/workshops will provide an opportunity for participants to explore websites/portals focusing on survivor and liberator testimonies, documents, photographs, and cultural artifacts (personal heirlooms). The second presentation will highlight one perpetrator’s trajectory through documents, as a case study for how this researcher used ancestry.com, a non-academic digital primary source database.

Paper Titles and Presenters

Untold Stories of the Holocaust from the Corners of Europe (Tutorial)
Rachel Century
Head of Research, Holocaust Memorial Day Trust
Louise Stafford
Director of Learning, National Holocaust Centre and Museum
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Across an Ocean: Using Public Digital Genealogy Repositories to Track Immigrant Holocaust Perpetrators (Case Study)
Claire Aubin
PhD Candidate in Religious Studies, University of Edinburgh
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Nebraska Stories of Humanity in a US Refugee Resettlement State: A Digital Humanities Approach (Interactive Workshop)
Beth Dotan
Doctoral Candidate, Research Assistant, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Laura Weakly
Metadata Encoding Specialist, Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
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Moderator
Rebecca Erbelding
Historian, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Computational Methods used in Curating the Morgenthau Diaries

October 14, 2021

The purpose of this workshop is to demonstrate how Holocaust Collections at the FDR Presidential Library can be digitally curated through automation and crowdsourcing. We demonstrate a range of techniques including:

• OCR ( Optical Character Recognition) & ML (Machine Learning) for segmenting index cards/volume indexes of the Morgenthau Diaries collection

• Combining ML and Crowdsourcing

• Automating Item-level description

• Recognizing document types & mapping relationships

• NLP (Natural Language Processing) for creating indexes

• Faceted searching

• Scholarly editing

• Linking to other collections on the web

We encourage scholars, historians, archivists, and the public to engage with us at this workshop through hands-on exercises and discussion. We will test and evaluate preliminary prototypes towards building more useful research interfaces.

Presenters
Richard Marciano
Director, Advanced Information Collaboratory (AIC), University of Maryland
William Underwood
Research Scientist, Advanced Information Collaboratory (AIC), University of Maryland
Teddy Randby
Research Fellow, Advanced Information Collaboratory, University North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Abby Gondek
Morgenthau Scholar-in-Residence, Roosevelt Institute, FDR Presidential Library and Museum

Moderator
Kirsten Carter
Supervisory Archivist, FDR Presidential Library and Museum

NARA and FDR Library Holocaust Resources

October 15, 2021

This session will introduce audience members to the FDR library and NARA collections related to the Holocaust (with a focus on American Responses), including educational resources, digital humanities projects using the Morgenthau Diaries and War Refugee Board Papers, the development of the Vrba Papers, and the WWII War Crimes records at the National Archives.

Paper Titles and Presenters

Nuremberg: Civic Education as a Safeguard to Never Again
Jeff Urbin
Education Specialist, FDR Presidential Library and Museum
Digital Humanities and the Morgenthau Holocaust Collections Project
Abby Gondek
Morgenthau Scholar-in-Residence, Roosevelt Institute, FDR Presidential Library and Museum
The Significance of the Rudolf Vrba Collection
Nikola Zimring 
PhD Student, New York University at the Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies
World War II War Crimes Records and Resources at the National Archives at College Park, MD
Sylvia Naylor
Archivist, Subject Matter Expert for Holocaust-related records, National Archives and Records Administration
Access session abstracts here>>

Moderator
Kirsten Carter
Supervisory Archivist, FDR Presidential Library and Museum

Visualizing Large Collections of Images: PixPlot as a Tool for Digital Humanists with a Case Study from Postwar Communal Memorial Books

October 15, 2021

This workshop explores how to use PixPlot, an image captioning tool that uses machine learning to identify patterns and group images within large photograph collections. The presenter will demonstrate how PixPlot can be used with Holocaust-related photographs that are either in pre-existing collections or in Hoffenberg’s case, new collections, like postwar communal memorial books.

Presenter
Elena Hoffenberg
PhD Student, History, University of Chicago
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Moderator
Paul Sparrow
Director, FDR Presidential Library and Museum

KEYNOTE: Auschwitz – What We Know Now, What We Knew Then

October 15, 2021

Michael Berenbaum examines the factual accuracy of Elie Wiesel’s account (in his memoir, All Rivers Run to the Sea) of a conversation with President Jimmy Carter about aerial photographs of Birkenau. Taken in 1944 and showing evidence of the gas chambers, the images were not developed until 1977. Referencing memos from the time, Berenbaum questions Wiesel’s depiction of the conversation – that President Carter admitted these aerial photographs had been available to FDR in 1944, and the President knew “what was going on in Auschwitz” and “nevertheless he did nothing” – asserting that both men would have been aware that the photos were not developed until the later date. He further examines why Weisel might have altered the facts.

Speaker
Michael Berenbaum
Director, Sigi Ziering Institute, Professor of Jewish Studies, American Jewish University

Moderator
Paul Sparrow
Director, FDR Presidential Library and Museum