The USC Shoah Foundation Institute, which until not long ago collected the testimonies of Jewish Holocaust survivors exclusively, is expanding its archive to include testimonies from Rwandans who lived through their country’s 1994 mass killings.
Four fellows from the Kigali Genocide Memorial Center in Rwanda’s capital, all of whom survived the massacre of 800,000 Tutsis by Hutu militias, have been in residence at the Shoah Institute in Los Angeles since mid-October, learning how to index information to make it accessible and available to researchers.
The collaboration between the two centers is planned to add 1,000 testimonies from Rwandan survivors to the 52,000 videotaped interviews of Holocaust survivors.
The move is not without controversy, reports the New York Times. Some people, particularly Jewish scholars and Holocaust survivor groups, feel that the uniqueness of the Holocaust should be preserved and fear that adding more voices to the Foundation’s holdings will dilute the singularity of the Nazi extermination campaign.
