The St. Louis Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum has launched an emergency fundraising campaign to save its Holocaust survivor stories after losing over $130,000 in federal support. The cut jeopardizes efforts to finish digitizing and sharing more than 300 oral histories from local survivors and liberators—accounts museum leaders say are vital to preserving St. Louis history, educating future generations and combating Holocaust denial.

Donations can be made at: https://give.stlholocaustmuseum.org/campaign/681860/donate

The campaign is a direct response to an April 8 decision by The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to end grant funding for institutions nationwide. The St. Louis museum had been using its grant, first awarded in 2022, to digitize its vast archive of oral histories—testimonies from local survivors who lived through ghettos, camps, hiding and liberation and later became neighbors, teachers and community leaders.

“The museum’s collection and archives, including the oral histories and the data connected to them, are essential to combatting Holocaust denial,” said Myron Freedman, executive director. “We are not any different from other history museums that preserve evidence for future generations to understand distant past events. Our job is to make accessible information coming directly from witnesses of the oppression and atrocities that led to the Holocaust. This is the source material historians rely on today, and will rely on tomorrow.”

Thanks to the IMLS grant, the museum had already digitized more than 200 cassette recordings—adding over 80 previously unavailable survivor voices to the archive. That brings the total to more than 300 oral histories now in digital form.

Survivor archive lacks funds to reach the public

But that was only phase one.

“The other work needing to be completed for the grant was the digitization of about 100 linear feet of documents, letters and photographs that are related to those interviews,” said Amy Moorman, the museum’s director of archives and collections. “We also planned to create full-text transcripts for each of the 300 interviews.”

Those transcripts, she explained, would allow for deeper educational impact—not just in local classrooms, but globally. The plan was to use a new online platform with advanced search tools and metadata cross-referencing to make the archive more accessible and meaningful for researchers, teachers and everyday users.

“Our permanent exhibition on the Holocaust starts and ends with the accounts of local Holocaust survivors,” Freedman added. “And throughout the exhibit they pop up to relay their direct experience with what happened: having their friends and neighbors turn against them, living in a ghetto with daily privation and death, as children being separated from parents and other family members never to see them again, being forcibly marched while suffering from starvation, miraculously surviving the murder of six million other Jews, and coming to St. Louis with nothing to start a new life.”

“Without the remaining funds owed from this grant,” Moorman said, “we will continue to struggle to provide access to these recordings that have been in our archives for years. Digitization was the first step and we are grateful to have completed it. But without the ability to complete this work… we are missing the final piece: the educational impact.”

That impact is not hypothetical

Over the last two years, the Jewish Light has partnered with the museum to share some of these stories—of survivors who faced Mengele, escaped Auschwitz-bound trains and returned to build new lives in University City, Richmond Heights and beyond.

Now, with the funding cut and no immediate backup, the museum is turning to the community for support. The emergency fundraising campaign will help cover staffing, transcription, software upgrades and the digitization of related materials.

The broader context of the grant’s termination is political. As Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported, the cut stems from a Trump administration executive order to shutter the IMLS and similar federal cultural agencies. Critics, including leaders of Jewish museums nationwide, warn the move undermines not just institutions, but their role in combating hate through education​.

For now, St. Louis Holocaust Museum staff are focused on what comes next.

“Every survivor’s story is part of our responsibility to preserve,” Moorman said. “And every survivor’s voice should be heard.”