Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies Spring Symposia

Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies 

Yale Library’s Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies has coordinated a number of incredible opportunities for learning and engagement this spring, spearheaded by Stephen Naron and Aya Marczyk. Naron has worked at the Fortunoff Archive as an archivist (2003-2008) and consultant (2008-2011) and was appointed its director in 2015. For the past two years, Marczyk has served as a Research Scholar at the MacMillan Center and a Curriculum Development Fellow at the archive, work that she also does with the Beinecke as of this year. 
 

“Roma, Jews, and the Holocaust” International Symposium 

Held on April 18-19, 2023, this event explored the intersections between Romani and Jewish experiences of persecution and between the ways Romani and Jewish survivors, activists, historians, artists, and organizations have sought to come to terms with those experiences. Naron shared that the symposium sought to “lift up the story and voices of the marginalized– both historically during the genocide as well as today, since Sinti and Roma are still being persecuted in Europe. This event can be seen as a humble effort to support the academic work in this field and combat antiziganism.” 
 

Shedding light on often overlooked histories, the event consisted of a series of panels and presentations, including Ari Joskowicz’s keynote on his book Rain of Ash: Roma, Jews, and the Holocaust, which won the 2022 Ernst Fraenkel Prize, and Aleksandra Szcecepan’s paper, “Negotiating Testimonial Agency: Polish Roma in Holocaust Archives.” Szcecepan offered a close analysis of a single testimony by Polish Roma survivor Krystyna Gil, recorded for the Fortunoff Video Archive in 1995, and highlighted the transformative power of Gil’s testimony and her role, which Naron emphasizes as both “a witness of the Romani Holocaust and an active agent in preserving Romani memory.” 
 

Demonstrating the archive’s dedication to furthering research and understanding of the experiences of Roma and Sinti communities during the Holocaust, it recently announced the Fortunoff Research Fellowship for Study of Roma and Sinti Persecution 2023/24 at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies.
 

Resistance and Struggle Across Racial Regimes: Germany, South Africa, and the United States 

Hosted by the Fortunoff Video Archive and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition (GLC) on May 18th, this symposium examined resistance to the race-based legal orders and social hierarchies of Jim Crow United States, Nazi Germany, and apartheid-era South Africa. 
 

This was one of a series of events planned by the archive and the GLC. In May 2021, they hosted a panel on Survivor Knowledge from the Holocaust, Antebellum Slavery, and Modern-Day Slavery; in May 2022, they convened the Kempf Symposium on Comparative Racial Regimes: Jim Crow in the United States, Apartheid in South Africa, and on May 18th they hosted the second part of this symposium, which included an academic panel and a teacher roundtable. 
 

Marczyk shared that “this partnership was inspired by the challenges of comparative analysis of race, citizenship, slave labor, and mass violence. We sought to explore what it means to make rigorous historical comparisons and to invite scholars and teachers to think together about both the value and limits of comparative and transnational histories.” Teachers attending the event discussed the power of oral history in the classroom; Daisha Brabham noted her students’ interviews with local activists, and Lindsey Rossler discussed how she’s incorporating the testimonies from the Fortunoff Video Archive into her approaches to teaching oral history. 
 

Marczyk indicated that the Fortunoff Archive and the GLC plan to work together to “continue supporting a strong local community of practice that brings together teachers and academics to discuss the histories of slavery, race, racism, antisemitism, Holocaust, and genocide.” 
 

The Fortunoff Video Archive and Facing History and Ourselves will soon host The Art of Listening - Video Testimony and the Study of History: A Summer Institute for Teachers to offer materials and strategies to teachers to support their students’ work with testimony and other oral histories. The focus on empathetic listening—learned in the context of Holocaust studies—aims to cultivate openness to others, especially those whose communities have been subjected to historical trauma. This event is part of an ongoing partnership with Facing History; Marczyk gave the keynote address and a workshop at their Shankman Symposium in January 2023. Marczyk hopes to “reach teachers with both the materials and the pedagogies that we offer.”