High-tech partnership will bring new Orlando museum to life
In Orlando’s new Holocaust museum, each day visitors will have the ability to ask questions directly of survivors — even those who are no longer living — and see their faces as they answer.
On Thursday, the Holocaust Memorial Resource and Education Center of Maitland announced a partnership with USC Shoah Foundation, founded by moviemaker Steven Spielberg, that will bring the foundation’s 55,000 video interviews to Orlando — only the fifth place in the world to house the unprecedent
ed digital collection in its entirety.
That collection includes more than 20 in-depth video testimonies, as they are known, which through artificial intelligence allow people to have face-to-digita-lface conversations with those who experienced the Holocaust firsthand. Called “Dimensions in Testimony” the technology is featured in several museums around the country and was the subject of a segment this year on CBS’s “60 Minutes.”
The partnership will elevate the stature of the Holocaust Center’s new museum, planned for a high-profile location near downtown Orlando, as well as the experience for its guests, officials said.
In a video presentation for museum supporters, Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer said the partnership would ensure a “world-class” facility, while Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings said it would contribute to the museum’s “global impact.”
“The Shoah Foundation is really the pinnacle of prestige,” Holocaust Center executive director Pam Kancher told the Orlando Sentinel. “The fact they have chosen us is darn special.”
Stephen Smith, executive director of USC Shoah Foundation, said in an interview that Orlando’s destination-city status as well as the Holocaust Center team’s approach, made the partnership appealing.
“It’s the mission and the ambition of the organization,” he said. “And in Orlando, we have the opportunity to reach a global audience.”
Scheduled to break ground in the first half of 2022, the 40,000-square-foot Holocaust Museum for Hope & Humanity, with its groundbreaking technology, will be a far cry from the organization’ s current 7,000-square-foot utilitarian space at Maitland’s Jewish Community Center. It will be located on the site of an old Chamber of Commerce building and park on Ivanhoe Boulevard, just north of downtown near I-4.
The dramatic expansion allows the creative team to consider new ways to explore the Holocaust while making historical lessons relevant to today’s world. Smith said he was intrigued by the chance to build a museum that is not just “his
tory books on the walls.”
“What I love about this is that the museum identified it’s about time to let the voices of the survivors be the center of the story,” said Smith, who is also the UNESCO chair on genocide education.
The testimonies from USC Shoah Foundation will make sure that’s the case.
Kancher was amazed when she interacted with the conversational video images on a visit to the foundation, headquartered at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles
“You asked a question, like ‘ Where are you from?’ and he started talking back,” she said of her digital conversation partner.
Foundation staff spends a week having each subject answer questions in front of cameras. They then store the recorded answers and create a database that keeps track of which video clip is logical to play after a visitor asks a specific question. As seen on “60 Minutes,” if visitors ask about current events, they are told that a recording wouldn’t know that. If visitors ask a question too off the wall, they are politely asked to rephrase.
For the most part, though, on-topic discussions run smoothly. “60 Minutes” interviewer Lesley Stahl called them “conversations that at times felt so normal that we could almost forget we were talking to the digital image of someone who was no longer living.”
As a creative consultant for the new museum, Smith also will be involved in its design and programming. He said building a connec
tion with the community was paramount.
“Not only are we going to tell the story of the Holocaust through their eyes, we’re going to ask people to bring their own stories to the museum,” he said. “We want to bring these together” to create “a meeting of minds, a meeting of stories.”
Though the collection’s testimonies are mainly from the Holocaust, in which some 6 million Jews were murdered during World War II, there are also interviews with those affected by more recent genocides in Rwanda, Myanmar and elsewhere.
There is a sense of urgency in collecting Holocaust testimonies, Kancher said, as the number of living survivors decreases each year.
The new museum’s creative team also includes Ralph Appelbaum Associates, responsible for the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., and architecture firm HuntonBrady, led by Maurizio Maso, who designed the UCF College of Medicine and AdventHealth’s College of Health Sciences.
Officials estimate they will need around $60 mil
lion for the project. So far, the center has raised about $17 million privately, and Orange County has approved $10 million from the tourist-development tax. Orlando will lease the museum the property for $1 per year, similar to deals the city has with other cultural institutions.
“The survivor testimonies will truly be the heart of the museum, and our programs will be the soul,” Kancher said.
Spielberg was inspired to found USC Shoah Foundation while filming “Schindler’s List.” In a video shown by the Holocaust Center, he explains the power of the video interviews.
“I’ve seen young people, young students, who have seen these testimonies,” he says. “It does change them. And that always gives me hope that the more we get this out into the world, thousands — and someday millions — of young people will be in some way changed by this.”