SHOAH STORIES
Learning about the Holocaust through Short Videos
English / Deutsch
SHOAH STORIES leverages the power of short-form video platforms for the purpose of Holocaust education. By focusing on dynamic content from established creators and institutions with practical tools for educators, this innovative project meets the evolving media habits of our times.
Engaging with Stories, Learning about the Holocaust
For many young people, short videos serve as primary sources of news, educational content, and historical knowledge. The brevity and visual appeal of short-form videos cater to changed forms of media use, limited attention spans and fast-paced lifestyles of modern teenagers. Shoah Stories: Learning about the Holocaust with Short Videos seeks to use the widespread influence of short-form video platforms to provide accurate and engaging Holocaust education to young people. Recognizing the profound impact of this format, our project aims to develop innovative educational approaches that use short-form videos to teach about the Holocaust and Nazi persecution, and by doing so to contribute to fostering democratic culture and to counter antisemitism and hate speech. We aim to develop an innovative educational platform that integrates modern short videos from established creators and institutions with practical tools for educators.
Commemoration with Short Video Content & Education
Over the past four years, the TikTok Shoah Commemoration & Education Initiative has supported over fifty memorials, museums and organizations to teach about the Holocaust, Nazi persecution, Jewish history and Antisemitism through short videos. These institutions have created TikTok channels and short video content, resulting in thousands of TikToks that cover a wide range of topics. Although these accounts have over 600,000 followers and millions of views, most views occur when the videos are initially launched, with limited engagement afterwards. This underutilization is a missed opportunity, as there exists a valuable library of short videos covering a wide range of topics from various institutions, each offering a unique perspective from locations, objects and stories ranging from throughout Europe, Israel, the United States of America and further countries.
Digital Education & Historical Awareness
Our project creates an educational platform serving as a gateway to this dynamic and growing library of Holocaust-related short videos. This educational platform offers a growing library of trusted short videos covering diverse topics and perspectives related to the Holocaust and aims to be readily accessible to high school and university students, allowing them to learn about the Holocaust through bite-sized video content in a format that captures their attention. As such, our project sets new standards in digital education in general and more specifically in Holocaust education. In doing so, the project also fosters historical awareness and combats misinformation, ensuring the lessons of the past are preserved and understood by future generations. For that purpose, we also organize international educator and expert workshops and conferences to develop teaching materials as well as support creators from museums and memorials to improve their content production in master classes and training workshops. We want to encourage young people to create their own content dealing with Holocaust memory and Antisemitism by themselves for their peers. These trainings are conducted within the Anne Frank Youth Network.
Learning through Short Videos
The project is accompanied by a research study that explores how young users engage with short videos about the Shoah. How do young people respond to these videos? Which topics and formats do they prefer? The results of our study will inform a series of recommendations as well as the development and improvement of the educational platform.
Project Partners
The project is funded by the Alfred Landecker Foundation and conducted by the Anne Frank Zentrum that coordinates the developing and implementing of the short video platform in cooperation with Partners Partners & Company, the initiator of the project. The technical development of the platform is realized by Scholz&Friends. The accompanied evaluation of the project is conducted by the Hebrew University Jerusalem.
