The USC Shoah Foundation has become a global partner of the Forum of Oral History of Ukraine

The Institute of Visual History and Education USC Shoah Foundation, founded by the famous American director, producer and screenwriter Steven Spielberg, became a global partner of the Forum of Oral History of Ukraine. The Forum will be held in Kyiv on October, 10 at the initiative of the Museum of Civilian Voices of the Rinat Akhmetov Foundation.

As part of the event, three panel discussions are planned on various aspects of documenting the war in Ukraine, as well as special speeches by keynote speakers.

The USC Shoah Foundation was founded by Spielberg in 1994 after he directed the "Schindler's List". "Shoah" means "catastrophe" in Hebrew. This is the name of the Holocaust, the mass murder of Jews during the German Nazi regime in the period 1941–1945.

The core purpose of USC Shoah Foundation is to give opportunity to survivors and witnesses to the Shoah—the genocide of the Jews—to tell their own stories in their own words in audio-visual interviews, preserve their testimonies, and make them accessible for research, education, and outreach for the betterment of humankind in perpetuity.

The Institute houses over 56,000 audio-visual testimonies conducted in 65 countries and in 44 languages. The Institute holds 11 patents on digital collection management technologies it developed. 115,000 hours of video testimony have been recorded with all content indexed and searchable to the minute.

The keynote speaker of the Forum of Oral History of Ukraine will be Inna Gogina, an archivist of USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive. She has been working at the Institute since 1999 in in a variety of capacities, including assistant production coordinator, historical content analyst, coordinator of international programs, and international digital education associate.

The event is an initiative of the Museum of Civilian Voices of the Rinat Akhmetov Foundation, which collects and documents firsthand testimonies of civilians about the war and has already collected more than 85,000 testimonies.

The Forum will be held in partnership with the USC Shoah Foundation and the Oral History Association, with the support of the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv and the Maria Curie-Sklodowska University (Lublin).

Participation in the Forum is free and possible with prior registration and confirmation from the hosts. Registration is available at https://forms.gle/UB8Z1c8LaZ56Nnpt8 and is open until October 8, 2023.

For press accreditation issues, please contact Olha Nosyk at [email protected].

For registration and additional questions, contact Volodymyr Kapustin at [email protected].

Follow the news of the Forum on its Facebook page: https://fb.me/e/1vf7B6r1P

and on the website of Museum of Civilian Voices https://civilvoicesmuseum.org/en/news