About Project Witness
A nonprofit Holocaust resource center, and the digital archive of its work
Project Witness is a nonprofit Holocaust resource center, founded in 1998 by Ruth Lichtenstein and based in Brooklyn, New York. For more than twenty-five years it has produced scholarship, documentary film, classroom curricula, and community programming devoted to transmitting the history — and the moral and spiritual response — of the six million Jews caught in the Nazi trap. This digital archive is its newest undertaking: a permanent home for the photographs, documents, and testimony that underlie that work.
Holdings are organized following internationally recognized archival standards (DACS and ISAD·G), with parallel descriptions in Hebrew and English, high-resolution imagery delivered through IIIF-compliant viewers, and metadata openly available for research and educational use. They include materials assembled across more than two decades of survivor interviews, family donations, and partner collaborations.
The archive in numbers
Records
People & places
Curated exhibits
Period covered
Mission
To transmit the history, and the moral and spiritual response, of the six million Jews caught in the Nazi trap.
Project Witness merges judicious scholarship with cutting-edge media to make Holocaust history accessible to schools, scholars, and the broader public. This archive extends that mission online: to digitize, describe, and openly share the primary sources behind every book, film, curriculum, and conference Project Witness has produced — alongside materials contributed by survivors, their descendants, and partner institutions. Every record published here is an act of remembrance and an invitation to inquiry.
Built on archival standards
Every record is described, governed, and delivered using the same internationally recognized standards that research libraries and national archives rely on.
- DACS
- Describing Archives: A Content Standard. Used for all archival description in line with U.S. and international practice.
- ISAD(G)
- General International Standard Archival Description, the multilevel hierarchy that organizes our collections from fonds to item.
- IIIF
- International Image Interoperability Framework. Imagery is delivered as deep-zoomable IIIF, viewable in any compliant client.
- OAI-PMH
- Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. Our metadata is openly harvestable for aggregation and discovery.
Ethics
Ethics & access policies
How we describe harmful language, classify privacy, handle takedown requests, and warn about difficult content.
Read the policies →For researchers
Reuse, citation & access
Rights statements, citation guidance, accessibility, and the open APIs we publish.
See researcher resources →Available in Hebrew and English
Records carry parallel descriptions where translations exist. Hebrew text is searchable with morphological awareness — niqqud, root forms, and typographic variants are normalized.
Partners & contributors
This archive is the result of ongoing collaboration. Project Witness works with research institutions, museums, and academic partners; with the schools, community centers, and congregations that have hosted its educators conferences and screenings; and with the survivors, descendants, and donors who have entrusted their materials to be preserved. For inquiries about partnership or donation of materials, please write to us.
Contact
For inquiries about access, donation of materials, or partnership opportunities, reach out by email.
Write to the archive
Federal Support
This archive has been made possible in part by a major grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), an arm of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).
Federal funding for this initiative was secured through congressionally directed spending championed by U.S. Senator Charles E. Schumer, whose advocacy in the United States Senate made this archive possible.
Project Witness gratefully acknowledges this federal support, as well as the contributions of our matching funders, partners, and donors who have helped bring this work to the public.