Fabian Ruehle
Vienna
Austria
- Youth and education
Our mission consists of two parts: to use advanced technologies to capture Jewish memory, and then disseminate our projects to the widest audiences possible. Our goal is to create a project that is less about how Jews perished during the Holocaust, but is much more about how they lived--before, during and after. The concept: to create a digital bridge back to a world that you and I can no longer physically visit, but is one that lives on in the stories and old photographs of elderly Jews still living in fifteen European countries. Since few Jewish families remain in Bulgaria, Bosnia, Serbia and Greece, we emphasize our Balkan projects, and also work inside the Jewish community of Turkey.
Although we interviewed 1,300 elderly Jews, we did not use video in these interviews nor did we focus on the Holocaust. Instead, we collected 25,000 old family pictures, digitized them and set them into a searchable online database. We are now creating an innovative, online educational program that relies on short multi media films, followed by online study guides. We bring teachers from various backgrounds and countries together to watch these films in small groups, then work with other teachers to help them implement the programs in their classes.