On October 23–25, 2017, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum hosted the EHRI-sponsored international workshop “Standing up to Scrutiny: Authenticating Holocaust Documentation.” Curators, archivists, conservators, and scholars from Europe, Israel, and the United States presented case studies on objects, textiles, photographs, and film. Presentations emphasized the fundamental duty of Holocaust collection-holding institutions to perform due diligence to ensure authenticity, especially as we make this documentation accessible to the broadest audiences through digitization and online access. Case studies focused not only on outright forgeries discovered through forensic research but also misrepresentations and misattributions of authentic materials revealed through expert historical research.

Desire for more workshops

Participants expressed a strong desire for more workshops on authenticity as well as a need to create a database or other means to share information on known forgeries. This would be of particular value to smaller institutions that do not have the resources needed to perform expert authentication.

Tour of the USHMM’s new Shapell Collection, Conservation and Research Center

The workshop also included an opportunity to tour the USHMM’s new Shapell Collection, Conservation and Research Center, a state-of-the-art facility that opened in April 2017, to view items from the Museum’s study collection and to meet with conservation and collections management staff.