On Anne Frank’s Birthday, Holocaust Museum Launches Push To Digitize Diaries
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
WASHINGTON (JTA) — The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum has launched a $250,000 Kickstarter campaign to translate and digitize the diaries of Nazi victims and survivors.
Funds from the 31-day campaign, which started on Anne Frank’s birthday — Monday, June 12 — to commemorate the renowned teen diarist, would allow the museum to translate its collection of over 200 diaries into English and catalogue them. The museum only gets the funds it if meets its goal.
The campaign is being promoted on social media under the hashtag #SaveTheirStories.
The diary collection will expose an array of experiences to the public, including the struggle of life in the ghettos, emotional accounts of survival in concentration camps and “the search for refuge in America,” according to the museum.
“Making the evidence of the Holocaust widely available is critical to promoting its understanding and countering those who would deny it,” a museum official, Dana Weinstein, said in a statement. “With the support of people from around the world united behind this project, we will help make more voices of those persecuted by Nazism heard.”
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
