LOS ANGELES, California – The Survivor Mitzvah Project (SMP) has launched the Projects’ Holocaust Educational Archive, a repository of never-before-recorded materials in all media. The scope of the collections includes more than 500 hours of video and 12,000 documents and photographs. Intimate interviews with survivors, rescuers, and eyewitnesses aim to preserve the vanishing history of a generation, while creating a dynamic, new, innovative way to teach the Holocaust to current and future generations. 

SMP’s Holocaust Educational Archive is the first project of its kind, focusing on a lesser known chapter of the Holocaust, “the Holocaust in the East.” It contains the only existing recorded testimony of thousands of individuals, and riveting footage of rapidly deteriorating synagogues, cemeteries, killing fields, and other remnants of Jewish life and culture across nine countries in Eastern Europe: Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Slovakia, Transnistria, Ukraine and parts of Russia. These are the voices of those who barely escaped the mass killings of the Einsatzgruppen, who hid in the forests or were trapped in ghettos, fought as Partisans or survived little known concentration camps. 

An extensive, interactive Holocaust educational platform in sync with the digital age, the archive will be available in museums, schools, online, and through an educational mobile app which takes the user on a journey-style adventure through Eastern Europe, while learning about the historical and present-day events surrounding the Holocaust.

The Survivor Mitzvah Project is an urgent humanitarian effort bringing emergency aid to elderly Holocaust survivors in Eastern Europe who are in desperate need of food, medicine, heat and shelter. They also ensure that the voices of these survivors are heard. 

The Survivor Mitzvah Project has been recognized by the Simon Wiesenthal Center and honored with The CNN Hero Award, The Anti-Defamation League’s Deborah Award, The Mensch International Foundation Award, and KCET’s Local Hero Award.

For more information: email survivormitzvah@gmail.com or visit www.survivormitzvah.org.