“Survived to Tell – Be The Witness” VR experience used to build empathy around October 7, combat antisemitism

[A virtual reality presentation that uses presence to build empathy and understanding around the events of October 7, 2023 is described in this story from The Times of Israel. The experience is being provided around the world, including on college campuses in the U.S., to depoliticize the issues and counter antisemitism. See the original version of the story for four more images. More details are provided in coverage in the Pasadena Weekly and LA Downtown News; the latter includes this:

“Produced by Stephen D. Smith, the former USC Shoah Foundation executive director, the project uses cutting-edge technology to ‘give survivors a voice, educating the world about trauma, survival, and resilience.’ ‘The project, inspired by Holocaust survivor testimonies, aims to evoke empathy and action,’ [ISRAEL-is CEO Nimrod] Palmach said. The VR film has positively impacted students, with 88% reporting enhanced understanding and 70% expressing a desire to act.”

More information is available on the ISRAEL-is website. –Matthew]

[Image: Stephen Smith in Tel Aviv, February 22, 2024. Credit: Shoshanna Solomon]

To build empathy around Oct. 7, former USC Shoah Foundation head pushes new VR project

Holocaust expert Stephen Smith believes disseminating augmented first-person accounts from a freed hostage and Nova survivors will help combat denial on US college campuses

By Shoshanna Solomon
January 19, 2025

Five survivors of the Hamas atrocities of October 7, 2023, provide their harrowing testimony in a new virtual reality project helmed by Stephen Smith, who ran Steven Spielberg’s USC Shoah Foundation for over a decade.

Smith has partnered with Israel-is, a pro-Israel organization led by Nimrod Palmach — an October 7 hero who himself provides testimony for the project — to produce “Survived to Tell – Be The Witness.”

Each survivor recounts where they were and what they were doing at 6:28 a.m., the moment before the first rockets were fired, and continues with what happened to them during the attack and how they are now.

The survivors are Ofir Engel, a 19-year old Dutch-Israeli national who Hamas took hostage from Kibbutz Be’eri and held captive for 54 days; Palmach, 40, a civilian and IDF reservist who saved over 500 lives while combating Hamas terrorists; Remo Salman El-Hozayel, a 37-year-old Bedouin Israeli police officer who rescued over 200 Nova festival partygoers; Mazal Tazazo, a 35-year-old Ethiopian Israeli woman who witnessed the slaughter of her friends but survived by faking her death; and Millet Ben Haim, 28, who hid in the bushes for hours on the Nova premises until she was rescued.

The first virtual reality screening of the educational project for university campuses, featuring the stories of Engel and Palmach, was rolled out to US media on November 18 and 19 in Los Angeles. It hopes to reach 100,000 students on US campuses, both Jewish and non-Jewish, to combat October 7 deniers and antisemitism.

“Survived to Tell – Be The Witness” has already been screened as a pilot to audiences in the UK, Australia, Mexico, and New York. The plan is to bring the project to 500 campuses in the US this year.

The stories will help depoliticize the conversation around the October 7 events and generate empathy rather than sympathy, says Smith. This “enables us to see humanity in all its shapes and sizes, including those who are suffering on the other side,” he says.

Smith, a former Evangelical Christian who visited Israel with his family at the age of 13 and immediately felt a connection to Judaism, went on to study Christian and Jewish theology at university. He has also set up the UK Holocaust Centre and the Aegis Trust for the prevention of crimes against humanity and genocide. In 2021, he stepped down from his role at the USC Shoah Foundation, where he had helped set up an archive of over 50,000 testimonies from survivors of the Holocaust and of genocides from Armenia to Rwanda. Together with his Jewish wife, Heather Maio-Smith, in 2017 Smith co-founded StoryFile, which then developed the AI-based interactive conversational video platform Conversa.

After spending 30 years fighting antisemitism as a non-Jew, which in his mind was more effective than fighting it as a Jew, Smith converted to Judaism in 2023, just weeks before October 7. He now marvels at the feeling of finally officially belonging to his people.

“Try fighting antisemites for 30 years on your own as a Christian,” he said. “That’s lonely.” As a Jew, he said, “Now I’ve got 15 million new friends whom I can turn to. I am not on my own.”

The following interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Why is it important to document October 7?

There are several reasons. First, there’s going to need to be a judicial process in the future, and every shred of evidence that can be collected should be collected. Second, the story needs to be told by the eyewitnesses, the people that were there.

Third, there must be an accessible way to hear those stories in particular because of the very well-crafted counter-narrative of what’s happening in Gaza. So, the Israeli experience needs to be rooted in the real lives of real people and told through their voices. That then allows us to also hear the voices on the other side. And for the “other side,” I don’t mean the perpetrators or those complicit but those who have suffered because of the same evil source. And to be ready, when the time comes, to make bridges. We need to first acknowledge and address our own pain if we are ever to heal.

Talk to me about “Survived to Tell – Be the Witness.”

Viewers will be able to stand at the spaces and places in which the eyewitnesses were throughout the day on October 7. The viewer gets to choose whose story to follow: You could follow Remo as he is rescuing people in his car, or you could be hiding under the bush with Mazal. We are not recreating the experiences, but standing in those places, as the survivors tell us the story of what happened. We juxtapose footage from that day into their stories, so you see footage of Remo driving that was taken by kids who were in the back of his car, giving the viewer the strong impression of being inside that virtual reality space with them.

What has the feedback been?

The feedback was first from the interviewees. I remember when Mazal watched her own story for the first time. She took off the glasses and she went, “Wow, I feel like I just relived it.” That was the most significant endorsement, the fact that those who went through that experience felt that it resonated with what they had been through.

We also noticed that the stories help depoliticize the conversation. Because once you are faced with who this human being is, there is nothing to talk about politically. Here is a person who went to a party with her best friends and returned home alone, who says she has lost her trust in humanity. And that is very grounding. And if anything comes out of this, it is not sympathy, but empathy. And that empathy equips us to have deeper conversations that are not politicized and shallow but are about humanity. It enables us to see humanity in all its shapes and sizes, including those who are suffering on the other side. Because if you develop the skill of empathy for one, you can apply that to all.

You will be screening the stories on campuses across the US. Are you worried about their reception, given the rise in antisemitism?

I’m not afraid of that. Does antisemitism exist? Yes, but if we’re afraid of it, we’re never going to tackle it. We must stop getting anxious about it and get in and do the work. We must understand why they think what they think, and not imagine them as some kind of monolithic horde, because they’re all individual human beings, and there are lots of different factions and groups that we are all lumping together. We’ve got to stop that. We’ve got to talk to them individually. We must create content that they will understand. We must be winsome; we must be persuasive, tell good stories, change the story. We must put out a narrative that enables people to engage in a positive way. If we don’t do these things, we simply cannot expect them to engage.

Tell me about your technology.

AI allows us to crowdsource large amounts of material very quickly. This was not possible before. We moved from writing books in the ’70s and ’80s to video projects in the ’90s, including those of the USC Shoah Foundation. They were the first large, crowdsourced videos, but they were very expensive and time-consuming.

Now, with the use of AI, we can produce videos and publish them on the same day, fully transcribed, fully translated and keyword indexed. The USC Shoah Foundation took five years and tens of millions of dollars to collect 55,000 testimonies. Using the Conversa platform, of which I’m a founder, we could collect 50,000 testimonies in a week, if we wanted to.

People compare what happened on October 7 to the Holocaust. Is that accurate?

I don’t think comparisons are helpful because these are different circumstances. The Holocaust was, depending on how you count, 12 years in the making, a slow-rolling genocide to start with, and then it accelerated and became extremely intense. We are sufficiently far from the Holocaust at this moment to forget that this was as intense as the October 7 [events] for the equivalent of thousands of days. We must never forget that.

That said, the October 7 attack was genocidal in nature, and part of the Hamas charter, from an ideological perspective, is very close to the ideology of the Nazis. The difference here is that, unlike the Jews in Europe, Israel has a military, the means of self-defense. And we have a country and supporters and allies, none of which the Jews of Europe had at that time.


Comments


Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

ISPR Presence News

Search ISPR Presence News:



Archives