The Jackson-Hinds Library System and Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation recently partnered to present the Testimony to Tolerance Initiative. The Initiative is a comprehensive program, which offers cities like Jackson, where access to visual history materials is limited, the opportunity to initiate community-driven, tolerance education programs and house a unique and powerful primary resource that will create a local educational environment that addresses the issues that arise when any kind of intolerance is present.

At the center of the Testimony to Tolerance Initiative is the Jackson Visual History Collection; twenty-one English language testimonies of Holocaust survivors and other witnesses from the Shoah Foundation’s visual history archive, one of which was conducted in Mississippi. The Jackson Visual History Collection represents a microcosm of the Shoah Foundation’s entire archive of more than 50,000 testimonies. Each of the 21 testimonies is a unique life story that includes personal memories of pre-war life, the struggle to survive, and the aftermath of the war. The testimonies in the collection were recorded with interviewees that were born in five countries across Europe including France, Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Russia. In addition to the testimonies themselves, the Shoah Foundation will provide the Library with a Testimony Catalogue Binder, a notebook containing biographical information about each interviewee, such as name, date and country of birth, enabling viewers to search the collection for testimonies that closely match their specific areas of interest. The Collection is available to the public at the Eudora Welty Library.

The Shoah Foundation, with the help of an Educational Site Coordinator stationed at the Eudora Welty Library, will conduct educational outreach to Jackson’s middle and high schools, using visual history testimony as the cornerstone of an extensive pedagogic program.

Video is an engaging educational medium for today’s students, and one to which they readily respond. In their testimonies, Holocaust survivors and other witnesses speak not only about the tragedy that befell them and those they loved, but also about their childhood experiences and day-to-day life, their traditions, their friendships, their family. When watching testimonies, students can develop an immediate and intimate bond with the person on the screen and become personally and emotionally affected.  

“Nothing imparts truth and emotion like a person talking directly to you, saying ‘This happened to me,’” explained Steven Spielberg, Shoah Foundation Founding Chairman. “By putting real faces, real voices, real experiences directly before this and future generations, they can learn how our very humanity depends on the practice of tolerance and mutual respect,” he continued.

The educational outreach component of the Testimony to Tolerance Initiative is integral in supporting community utilization of the Jackson Visual History Collection and encouraging direct student involvement and action. With the help of the Shoah Foundation and the Educational Site Coordinator, an on-site workshop for local educators will be conducted at the Eudora Welty Library in late August. The workshop will show attendees how to effectively “mine” their new resource – including how to identify clips of testimony that are particularly valuable in an educational setting, how to create activities around testimony, how to use testimony in the classroom, how to incorporate testimony into existing lessons and other materials, and how to create testimony reels.

In Phase III of the program, Jackson educators and students will form Diversity Clubs at their schools. School clubs encourage school-wide and community outreach, and inspire participation and leadership within the school community; transforming ideas into action and encouraging students to do something with the lessons they learned from watching the visual histories. In this way the Testimony to Tolerance Initiative is not a self-contained program; rather it continues on, inspiring young members of each community to get involved in their own grassroots diversity efforts.   

According to Douglas Greenberg, Shoah Foundation President and CEO, “The life stories in the Shoah Foundation archive have an important educational value, not only because they support the study of the Holocaust, but also because they often broach questions of fairness, justice, labeling, or scapegoating—issues that adolescents confront in their daily lives. Watching testimony inspires young people to think about their behaviors and biases today, and provokes dialogue about their role as citizens in a multicultural and multiracial society.”

So often, we hear survivors share their hopes for the future; as one survivor expressed, “It is not an issue of forgetting or forgiving. It’s an issue of learning.” Perhaps nothing is more significant than providing these perspectives in educational materials for classrooms and research, ensuring that students are equipped with the tools that enable them to act on their own behalf and on the behalf of others. Through the Testimony to Tolerance Initiative, students in Jackson will become teachers, sharing stories of how they first came into contact with a survivor or witness, how they put a face to history, and how the connection to these eyewitnesses became personal and lifelong.

The official launch of the initiative on May 4 at 10:00 AM at the Eudora Welty Library serves as an important event for the Jackson community. As the first city in the nation to implement the Initiative, Jackson is leading the way in innovative ways to promote tolerance and diversity. The Testimony to Tolerance Initiative in Jackson is made possible by generous funding from the Levy-Markus Foundation.