J-Wire: Yad Vashem using AI to restore memory of Holocaust. “Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Centre in Jerusalem announced Sunday that it has started using state-of-the-art AI technology including a new image detection capability to help comb through the world’s largest archive documentation of the Holocaust.”
Axios: Fortnite is getting an unofficial Holocaust museum . “The virtual building, called the Voices of the Forgotten Museum, will let players walk its halls to read plaques describing the genocide against Jews in Nazi Germany and see photos of Jewish resistance fighters and heroic individuals who sheltered Jews. While Fortnite is typically used as a cartoony multiplayer competitive shooting game, visitors to the Museum, which will be offered as a separate, peaceful experience, will not be able to play the game inside it.”
BBC: Website set up for Alderney Nazi death camp review. “A dedicated website has been launched, external to share the latest research as part of a review into the number of deaths in Alderney during World War Two. The island – along with the rest of the Channel Islands – was occupied by Germany and housed four forced/slave labour sites, including the concentration camp Lager Sylt.”
BRNO Daily: New Online Database Presents Wartime Testimonies of Czech and Slovak Roma. “The stories of Roma survivors from the Czech and Slovak Republics about their experience during World War II are now available on Svedectvi Romu, an online database launched today, symbolically, on International Roma Holocaust Memorial Day, the Czech Academy of Sciences has announced. The website will eventually contain around 250 testimonies, with both Czech and English versions of the database.”
University of Manchester: Ukraine data project is recognised for its innovation by OECD. “A project involving experts from The University of Manchester which created a live ‘early alarm’ system of major displacement, human rights abuses, humanitarian needs and civilian resistance in Ukraine has been recognised by the OECD’s Observatory of Public Sector Innovation.”
USC Shoah Foundation: Past, Present and Future: Redesigned Visual History Archive to Expand Global Access to Holocaust and Genocide Testimonies . “USC Shoah Foundation today releases a complete redesign of its Visual History Archive (VHA), the world’s largest collection of primary source video testimonies from survivors of the Holocaust and other genocides.”
USC Shoah Foundation: Public Launch of the New Visual History Archive. “Join us on campus or on Zoom for the public launch of USC Shoah Foundation’s new Visual History Archive (VHA) platform. With advanced new search functions and robust project management tools, the new VHA enables scholars, researchers and educators to connect with the 55,000 testimonies of Holocaust and genocide survivors and witnesses in a way that has never been possible until now.” November 9th, virtual and in-person. Admission is free but you have to register.
New Jersey 101.5: Digital archive catalogs thousands of Holocaust survivors in NJ. “When Stockton University professor Michael Hayse and some students started working in 2019 on a project to catalog South Jersey Holocaust survivors, they thought it would take about a year, and net a few hundred names. But three years later, the project continues, and now hundreds of involved students have found the names of 1,500 Holocaust survivors who live or lived in Atlantic, Cape May, and Cumberland counties.”
Wall Street Journal: Ukrainians Try Crowdsourcing to Catch Russian War Criminals. “The Justice Initiative Fund focuses its efforts only on war-crimes suspects officially ‘wanted’ by Ukrainian or foreign authorities. It states that it is ‘against vigilantism’ and doesn’t order assassinations of suspects. Instead, it seeks information it can verify and pass along to law enforcement to facilitate an arrest, as well as ‘previously unknown evidence of the crimes of the wanted person.’”
University of Maine: Knowles developing website to tell the story of Holocaust victims through places . “Anne Knowles believes that places provide important information about historical events. The University of Maine professor and graduate coordinator in the History Department has made an academic career studying the relationship between geographical circumstances and major societal shifts, exploring topics from Welsh emigration to the United States to why American entrepreneurs struggled to match the productivity of the British iron industry. Now, Knowles is working with a team of historians and geographers to create a digital platform for students and educators to trace the geographies of the Holocaust and connect victimsʼ stories to the places where they happened.”
WFMJ: Digitized Holocaust survivor testimonies available on Youngstown Jewish Federation Website. “Newly digitized recordings of the testimonials of Holocaust survivors are now available on the Youngstown Area Jewish Federation’s website. The Federation’s Jewish Community Relations Council teamed up with the Mahoning Valley Historical Society to digitize numerous analog audio and video recordings of these testimonies contained in the Dr. Saul Friedman Collection.”
University of Southern California: #LastSeen: Searching for forgotten photographs of Nazi deportations . “USC Dornsife’s Center for Advanced Genocide Research is the only non-German partner in the first major international initiative to gather and analyze images showing Nazi deportations during World War II — and they want the public’s help.”
Rafu Shimpo: First National Names Monument Honoring JAs Incarcerated During WWII to Launch in Fall. “With the support of a $3.4 million grant from the Mellon Foundation, the USC Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture is creating Irei: National Monument for the WWII Japanese American Incarceration, a multi-faceted project to address the erasure of the identities of individuals of Japanese ancestry who experienced wartime incarceration.”
Times of Israel: National Library finds rare 18th-century text detailing Portuguese Inquisition. “An 18th-century document detailing the activities of the Portuguese Inquisition, which punished people for upholding Jewish traditions and committing other transgressions, has been found by the National Library of Israel and made available online, the library announced.”
The New Times (Rwanda): Activists renew call to return UN court archives to Rwanda. “Following the appointment of the new president of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (IRMCT), activists have renewed call to bring to Rwanda physical archives of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR).”
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