Elie Wiesel Digital Archive

A Major New Initiative of Gratz College 

 

Gratz is proud to have been selected by the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity to host and curate a digital archive dedicated to the life’s work of Elie Wiesel, a Nobel laureate, author of Night, and one of the most important human rights leaders in modern world history.  

Throughout his career as a journalist, scholar, and activist, Elie Wiesel carried the mantle of millions of Holocaust survivors and martyrs. His stories, theologies, and philosophies undergirded a career of peerless service to humanity. His travels and discussions, conducted in private and in public, underscore Wiesel’s indefatigable quest for peace and fair dialogue among disparate people. The collection’s unique materials capture Wiesel’s worldwide footprint and prominent role in perpetuating the messages and values of the Holocaust and post-Holocaust periods.  

With support from donors and partners, Gratz will launch the Elie Wiesel Digital Archive in 2025. As an emerging field leader in archive digitization with the world’s largest degree program in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Gratz is uniquely positioned to preserve and to bring the content of the Elie Wiesel Digital Archive to the largest number of educators and widest array of students. 

In accord with Wiesel’s global reputation and the vastness of the archival content, Gratz will design and build a state-of-the-art online archive for the Wiesel collection that features advanced search and filter/sort tools, high quality UI/UEX (user interface/user experience), and high standard cybersecurity protections. The Archive will support significant visitor traffic, include visually powerful and interactive displays, and ensure ADA compliance for accessibility.  

The Archive will be a major asset of the Holocaust Geniza Project, a transformative initiative supported by the Claims Conference and the Barbara and Fred Kort Foundation, to assemble Gratz’s important collections and democratize them for free and public use. The project’s objective is to preserve primary source materials and other Holocaust-related resources and artifacts—making them accessible to its students, the larger academic community, and the general public. This solid foundation will allow Gratz to stack buildable, integrated digital collections. This latest addition, the Elie Wiesel Digital Archive, will be the part of the ecosystem of Jewish digital humanities and archives collections curated and hosted by Gratz College. 

By providing free and open access to the Elie Wiesel Digital Archive’s extraordinary, multimedia repository of primary source documents, Gratz aims to: 

• Contribute significantly to increased scholarship and impact in the arena of Holocaust, genocide, and human rights education  

• Empower educators to utilize the Archive in classrooms and in other learning environments in ways that help students make meaning of its primary resource documents 

• Empower educators and researchers to connect the materials found in the Archive with others found across the integrated ecosystem of Jewish digital humanities and archival collections curated and hosted by Gratz College. 

For more information about this project and opportunities to support it, please contact Naomi Housman, Director of Institutional Advancement at nhousman@gratz.edu