'We immediately saw it was mass violence against Jews'

After reaching Israel days after Oct. 7, USC Shoah Foundation is now helping record it

The organization’s researchers gathered hundreds of witness testimonies after the massacre and is sharing them with Israel’s National Library while advising on forming a collection

Reporter at The Times of Israel

Destroyed houses from the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on southern Israel, in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, September 19, 2024. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)
Destroyed houses from the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on southern Israel, in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, September 19, 2024. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)

Eight days after Hamas terrorists infiltrated from Gaza and murdered 1,200 people in southern Israel, researchers with the USC Shoah Foundation were on the ground at the scene of the massacre near the Gaza border gathering testimonies.

“We were among the first to issue a statement on what happened in southern Israel on October 7,” said Robert J. Williams, executive director of the USC Shoah Foundation.

“We recognized there was an urgency to capture the voices of people who had been caught up in those events. We immediately recognized it was a mass act of violence against Jews,” Williams told The Times of Israel.

To date, the USC Shoah Foundation has recorded 400 testimonies of October 7 survivors, first responders and other eye-witnesses. Some 370 testimonies are online, and all of the so-called “Bearing Witness” interviews were facilitated with the same pedagogy deployed by the foundation since 1994.

“We advised the National Library of Israel on how to create the collection of records for October 7,” said Williams. Named to lead the foundation in 2022, He previously held leadership roles at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.

The USC Shoah Foundation was founded by filmmaker Steven Spielberg in 1994, following his landmark film “Schindler’s List.” In 30 years, 52,000 Holocaust survivors gave testimony to the foundation’s trained documentarians.

In September, the National Library of Israel signed an agreement with the foundation wherein the latter will give Israelis full access to all testimonies in the archive, with search interfaces in Hebrew. The move, said Williams, is a step toward making the archive available to anyone in the world.

Currently, about 10 percent of the archive is available to anyone online. For full access, researchers must obtain permission from one of 180 university and museum partners of the foundation. By the end of 2024, said Williams, anyone with an Israeli IP address will be able to search, stream, or download testimonies from the archive.

‘We are expanding our focus’

After 30 years of gathering Holocaust testimonies, the USC Shoah Foundation is expanding the scope of its testimony-gathering mission.

With few survivors left to interview, it has been recording the testimonies of Jews who experienced antisemitism in the decades after the Holocaust.

Dr. Robert J. Williams, executive director of USC Shoah Foundation (Courtesy)

“We are expanding our focus on antisemitism since 1945,” said Williams.

Regarding the gathering of post-war testimonies, Williams referred to the expulsion of Jewish communities from Arab countries after 1948 as one area of focus. Other areas include the plight of Ethiopian Jews and how terrorist attacks have affected Jews in countries around the world.

The USC Shoah Foundation has also been working to build “a digital infrastructure” across the archive, said Williams. Similar to Google Translate, users will be able to view testimony in more than a dozen languages.

“This is about building an awareness [of antisemitism] through testimony,” said Williams.

In a few years, said Williams, USC Shoah Foundation researchers will follow up with the people who gave October 7 testimonies. All of this “will serve the future historical record,” he said.

In addition to recording post-Holocaust accounts of antisemitism, researchers have interviewed Yazidi refugees from Iraq and Kurds fleeing Syria, as well as survivors of genocide in South Sudan and the Central African Republic.

An installation consisting of chairs with books and portraits of Israeli hostages in Gaza seen at the new building of the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem, November 21, 2023. (Kenzo TRIBOUILLARD / AFP)

The USC Shoah Foundation’s role in gathering October 7 testimonies and making the core Holocaust archive fully available in Israel are not unrelated, said Williams. Citing the need for “strong cooperation” between Holocaust memory organizations in the US and Israel, Williams visited Jerusalem in March to sign an agreement with the National Library of Israel.

“Sharing the whole of our archive with the National Library of Israel helps tie and bind us to the homeland of the Jewish people,” he said.

Earlier in the year, USC Shoah Foundation founder Steven Spielberg spoke about the connection between the Holocaust archive and testimonies being recorded in southern Israel regarding the Hamas massacres of October 7.

“Both initiatives — recording interviews with survivors of the October 7 attacks and the ongoing collection of Holocaust testimony — seek to fulfill our promise to survivors: that their stories would be recorded and shared in the effort to preserve history and to work toward a world without antisemitism or hate of any kind. We must remain united and steadfast in these efforts,” said Spielberg.

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