VHS Shoah Stories in Danger of Disappearing Forever
Between 1992 and 1995, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) recorded 154 interviews with Orange County residents who had been in the Holocaust—all on VHS tape.
Included were 146 survivors, five Dachau liberators (three were Jewish and two African American Christians), and three Righteous Gentiles.
Some of the names may be familiar to you; for example, Mel Mermelstein, who in 1981 took on the Holocaust-denying organization known as the Institute for Historical Review and won; or Irving Gelman, who founded Tarbut V’Torah Day School in Irvine; or Jack Pariser, who spearheaded this project for the ADL. Other names, such as Irene Opdyke and Melvin Darden, maybe not so much.
Even as archivist for the Orange County Jewish Historical Society, I had no idea this collection existed until last spring. I discovered it while collaborating with UCI Libraries on an exhibit about Orange County’s Jewish community in the 1940s. Here, in our own backyard, is a treasure trove of recorded stories from a group of people who are rapidly passing on. It is in danger of continuing deterioration if not digitized soon.
VHS tapes degrade 10–20% over a period of 10 to 25 years. While better quality VHS tapes and those kept in a climate-controlled setting (like the ones in UCI Libraries Special Collections and Archives) have a slightly longer lifespan, the clock is still ticking. The tapes at UCI are now between 28 and 31 years old.
“UCI Libraries is honored to be a repository for these interviews,” said Krystal Tribbett, curator for Orange County Regional History at UCI Libraries. “We received the donation by way of Jack Pariser and the Orange County ADL in the 1990s. The OC ADL does not have physical copies anymore, so it is possible we are the only library with a full set of these interviews in the position to digitize and preserve all of them.
“There are others that were given copies—the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the 1939 Society [an organization of Holocaust Survivors, descendants and friends], Yad Vashem in Israel, and Cal State Fullerton—but to our knowledge none of them have published a finding aid/inventory or digitized all of them.
“[The U.S. Holocaust Museum] digitized only a portion of what Jack donated, and the 1939 Society partially digitized some of the interviews, but they have only published a few in their entirety, and they have not published all the interviews they have. It’s our understanding from talking with the archivist at the national ADL office that ours are a different set of interviews from what the USHMM has online.”
Tribbett said that support from the Orange County Jewish community and the OC ADL would be welcomed to help facilitate preservation and digitizing. Once the funds are raised, UCI Libraries will:
• Convert the VHS cassettes into digital video accessible by researchers and the public.
• Create and publish complete, full-text transcripts of the interviews.
• Catalog the electronic records to make them easily discoverable by researchers and the public.
• Develop a finding aid, a document used to discover detailed information on the collection.
This year, UCI Giving Day and Yom HaShoah fall on the same date, Tuesday, April 18, and UCI Libraries will be focusing its fundraising efforts on the $50,000 needed for this project.
To donate, please visit the UCI Giving Day website (https://givingday.uci.edu/giving-day/71230) and look for UCI Libraries under the Participating Groups tab or contact Angelica Vogel at angelica.vogel@uci.edu. For further information about the project to digitize the Orange County Holocaust Oral History
Project interviews, please go to https://give.lib.uci.edu/our-legacy.
DALIA TAFT is archivist of the Orange County Jewish Historical Society