Stephen Spielberg's Shoah Foundation has launched a campaign to record at least 50
testimonies from the North Africa and Middle East region, where the Nazi
regime had gained a foothold during World War II.
Mother of executed journalist Daniel Pearl, Ruth Pearl witnessed the 1941 Farhud in Iraq
USC Shoah
Foundation collected the first four testimonies in May of 2014 and is
raising funds to begin phase two, in which it plans to record 20 more.
These
audiovisual testimonies, once collected, will be digitized, indexed and
made accessible to people around the world through the Institute’s
Visual History Archive.
The Testimonies from North Africa and the
Middle East collection includes the life stories of Jews who were living
in North Africa and the Middle East during World War II and witnessed
the destruction created there by Nazi occupiers or governments that were
Nazi sympathizers.
Though far from the Holocaust in Europe, North
Africa and the Middle East were an important part of Hitler’s Final
Solution. Hitler intended to exterminate all Jews, not just those in
Europe, and according to Holocaust scholar Sir Martin Gilbert, the
persecution of the Jews in French North Africa was an integral part of
the Holocaust in France. For example, Nazis occupied Tunisia from
November 1942 until May 1943, and Jews throughout this part of the world
were subjected to deportation, imprisonment in concentration camps, and
the destruction of their homes, as well as severe anti-Semitism and
anti-Jewish laws from their own governments.
In the first phase of
the project in spring 2014, program director Jacqueline Gmach
interviewed Armand Abecassis, Andre Nahum, Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and
Albert Memmi, who are each highly respected scholars and/or authors
living in Paris. She was accompanied by interviewer Serge Moati, a
French artist, journalist, film director and writer, and videographer
Olivier Raffet. Ruth Pearl, mother of the late journalist Daniel Pearl,
also gave her testimony about growing up in Iraq during the Farhud of
1941.
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