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Video of Holocaust survivor interviews donated to YSU
By Denise Dick
YOUNGSTOWN
A donation from the Thomases Family Endowment of the Youngstown Area Jewish Federation makes Youngstown State University among the few U.S. universities with videotaped interviews of Holocaust survivors.
The gift to YSU’s Center for Judaic and Holocaust Studies was announced Thursday at the university.
“YSU will be the only Ohio institution to have such archives,” said Kristine Blair, dean of YSU’s College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences.
The collection includes testimonies of 30 Holocaust survivors who settled in the Mahoning Valley.
“History should be learned through those who lived it and survived it,” the dean said.
The interviews were part of the Shoah Foundation collection at the University of Southern California. Before the donation, the closest place in Ohio with testimonies from the Shoah collection was at the University of Michigan or the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
Helene Sinnreich, Clayman Professor of Judaic and Holocaust Students and director of YSU’s Center for Judaic and Holocaust Studies, noted that soon, there won’t be any Holocaust survivors to deliver firsthand accounts of their experiences.
“This wonderful gift will allow those voices to live on for generations, bringing their stories to students, researchers and the community at large for many years to come,” Sinnreich said in a news release.
She said two graduate students, Leah Ifft of Boardman and Brad Rosenthal from Cleveland, are working on a project for the center, collecting data on Holocaust survivors with a connection to the Valley.
“There are about 180 Holocaust survivors who came to the Mahoning Valley,” Ifft said.
Some of those survivors came through the Valley on their way somewhere else, she said. Others settled here, raised families and built businesses.
“We’re writing little bios on each of them,” Ifft said.
The researchers are reviewing records, photographs, diaries and whatever other information they can find.
“It’s a lot like detective work,” she said.
Ifft is writing her master’s thesis on the experiences of Holocaust survivors who came to the U.S. after World War II.
Rosenthal is a graduate student at YSU’s Beeghly College of Education, but his concentration in history brings him to YSU’s history department often.
His grandparents, who are Jewish, came from Germany to the U.S. before the war, settling near Cleveland.
The collection may be viewed online by anyone with a YSU login. Members of the general public will be able to view the materials at YSU’s Maag Library.