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Centropa was founded in Vienna and Budapest in 2000 so that we could use new technologies to preserve Jewish memory in the lands where it has been all but wiped out by the Holocaust. Our plan was to visit elderly Jews still living in this region, sit on their sofas, hold up their family pictures, and ask them to tell us stories about their lives before the Holocaust, during the horrors, and how they put their lives back together in the decades after.

By 2009, we had interviewed 1,232 elderly Jews in 15 countries, digitized 25,462 privately-held family photographs and transcribed 55,000 pages of interviews. The result: we have preserved a world, or at least a small corner of European Jewish memory. No one else had ever carried out an oral history project like this before. It is too late to embark on one now.

Our website can be found at www.centropa.org

In 2005, we began working in education and over the past fifteen years we have built a network of well more than 600 teachers on three continents who continually help us develop content that opens minds and touches hearts—from students in Hispanic schools in Texas, rural schools in the Carolinas, as well as in schools in development towns in Israel, industrial cities in Ukraine, and former shtetls in Lithuania and Poland. We also work in Germany and Austria, Hungary, Moldova, all the successor states of the former Yugoslavia, Greece and Slovakia.

Feel free to contact us at office@centropa.org, and we thank you for looking through this website.