History
The Holocaust Educational Foundation was founded in 1976 by Theodore Zev Weiss, a Holocaust survivor and trained educator, with the goal of encouraging the study of the Holocaust of European Jewry. For nearly four decades and through many different projects, the Foundation’s mission has always been the same: to expand Holocaust Studies by creating educational opportunities for students and faculty.
The first project undertaken by the Holocaust Educational Foundation was videotaping Holocaust survivor testimony. From 1982 to 1991, the Foundation recorded 300 interviews which are now archived at Yale University’s Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies.
Soon the Foundation broadened its focus to other, farther-reaching educational endeavors. In 1987 the Foundation began working with Professor Peter Hayes of Northwestern University’s History Department. In 1988, Hayes offered Northwestern’s first course specifically on the Holocaust. Shortly thereafter, the Foundation helped establish a Holocaust course at the University of Notre Dame. Over the subsequent decades, HEF has assisted in the development of new Holocaust courses at hundreds of universities and colleges around the world.
Weiss collaborated with Hayes, and later also with Christopher Browning, to develop the programs that remain at the heart of what the Foundation does: teaching and research grants, Holocaust Studies Institutes, and Lessons and Legacies Conferences. Weiss, Hayes, and Browning created a partnership in the Holocaust Educational Foundation that thrived on Weiss’s energy and experience, and on Hayes’s and Browning’s scholarship and professional advice.
After nearly four decades under Theodore Zev Weiss’s leadership, in July 2013 the Foundation joined Northwestern University and became the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University (HEFNU). The University is committed to supporting the mission of the Foundation, which remains a critical forum and catalyst for the study of the Holocaust in the US and abroad.
HEFNU has added several new programs since 2016: an international Lessons & Legacies Conference, held every four years in cooperation with the Center for Holocaust Studies at the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History (Munich), and funded by the German Federal Agency for Civic Education; the quadrennial Emerging Scholars Lessons & Legacies Conference; Regional Institutes on the Holocaust; a Virtual Mentorship Program; and a Virtual Speakers Bureau.