Our History

In 1981, our work began with the collection of audiotaped interviews of a group of Holocaust survivors attending a conference in Jerusalem. These interviews led to the creation of an organization that´s dedicated to recording and preserving the testimonies of Bay Area Holocaust survivors, the Holocaust Media Project. During the 1980s, the Holocaust Media Project recorded the stories of hundreds of local survivors, liberators, rescuers, and eyewitnesses to the Holocaust.

Toward the end of the 1980s, the Holocaust Media Project began conducting its interviews on videotape. We trained dozens of new volunteer interviewers. As a result, our videotaped interviews increased dramatically. To better capture the nature of the personal, visual stories which we´re recording, we changed the organization´s name to Holocaust Oral History Project. To emphasize our vision of a community-based organization, we have most recently changed our name to Bay Area Oral History Project.

After seventeen years and recording more than 1,500 interviews, the Bay Area Holocaust Oral History Project stands at the verge of an exciting phase of its development. While the organization continues to gather new interviews at a rate of about one every week, we´re now beginning the process of opening its collection of oral histories to the public.

We have developed an initiative to catalog the entire archive so that a database of all the interviews, which we´ll sort by names, places, dates, and subjects, will be available to students, scholars, and the general public. After reviewing the list of interviews on our database, you can borrow copies of interviews for home viewing.

We have also developed a second initiative to work with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. to archive and preserve our master videotapes. This video preservation effort will ensure that these testimonies remain part of the living historical record of the Shoah for all time.