LOS ANGELES — A noted scholar of the Holocaust has been named president and CEO of Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation.
Michael Berenbaum will resign as director of the Research Institute of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., to assume his new position in Los Angeles in January.
The Shoah Foundation was formed, following the success of Spielberg’s film “Schindler’s List,” to videotape and preserve the testimony and experiences of Holocaust survivors around the world.
So far, more than 23,000 survivors in 28 countries have been interviewed. The foundation’s goal is to complete 50,000 interviews by the end of 1997.
Spielberg praised Berenbaum’s background as an educator and scholar and said he would spearhead “the educational distribution of the archive and further the foundation’s mission over the next few critical years.”
Berenbaum said he would also be involved in continuing development of tolerance and Holocaust studies curricula.
Another focus will be in applying techniques created by the Shoah Foundation as a model for visual histories of other historical events, possibly the civil rights movement or the American experience in Vietnam, he said.
Berenbaum also answered criticism that the Shoah Foundation, thanks to Spielberg’s clout and financial backing, has stifled the work of older institutions engaged for many years in interviews with survivors.
The Holocaust projects under way elsewhere, he said, “are all related to each other. We are colleagues, not competitors.”
Five of the leading Holocaust research centers have been designated as repositories for testimonies being taped by the foundation. They are Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, Fortunoff Video Archive at Yale University and the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York.
A few critics have also questioned whether the Shoah Foundation’s interviewers possessed sufficient historical background and scholarly depth for their sensitive work.
“That’s one reason Steven Spielberg turned to me,” said Berenbaum, who has written 11 books on different aspects of the Holocaust and is an adjunct professor of theology at Georgetown University.
Berenbaum, 51, was a key figure in the creation of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and served as its first project director. Early last year, he was a candidate to serve as the museum’s overall director, but was not selected by the museum’s executive committee.
He has also won an Oscar and an Emmy award as co-producer of the documentary “One Survivor Remembers: The Gerda Weissman Klein Story.”
The Shoah Foundation encourages toll-free inquiries from Holocaust survivors. Call (800) 661-2092.