Companions on the Journey to Trauma: Dori Laub, Edut 710,

Companions on the Journey to Trauma: Dori Laub, Edut 710, 

and the Ethics of Documentary Listening

Free entry with  reservation

"The listener to trauma comes to be a participant and a co-owner of the traumatic event…a companion on a journey to an unreached land, a journey the survivor cannot traverse or return from alone."

-Dori Laub, Testimony, 1992. 

Part 1 The Listener, Documentary, 60 minutes, A Film by Micha Livne and Ohad Ofaz:

When psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Dori Laub meets trauma victims, he does not hand out pills, but rather listens to them and documents their stories. At the end of the 1970s, he began to listen to and document Holocaust survivors, leading to the establishment of the world's first video testimony archive. 

During the film, Laub's personal world is revealed – his memories as a boy in the concentration camps of Romania; his love for Johanna, the daughter of a former Nazi officer; and his children listening to his testimony for the first time. The film follows Laub for the final four years of his life and outlines his unique approach of committed listening and testimony, using archival footage from dozens of testimonies that he conducted over a 50-year period. His approach was adopted by the Edut 710 project when its members set out to document the survivors of the Hamas massacre of 7.10.23.

The film was produced with the support of the Galil Film Fund, Yale University, and the Claims Conference. Production, Photography, and Direction by Micha Livne; Script and Direction by Ohad Ufaz, Edited by Chen Shelach.

Part 2 – The Ethics of Listening and Testimony – From Dori Laub to Edut 710: 

In the stormy days immediately following the October massacre, when the personal and collective trauma was fresh and particularly powerful, we were inundated with films and media that hurried to document the horror stories. This documentation faced us, the documenters, with a variety of numerous ethical dilemmas. The Edut 710 project is a collective, multi-disciplinary civic project, consisting of hundreds of volunteers, that was founded immediately following 7.10.23 to document, archive, and present to the public in Israel and around the world the stories of the survivors, in their own visage and their own voice. The project is based on an ethical commitment to witnesses and communities, in the spirit of and according to the approach of Dori Laub. 

Project volunteers – documenters and editors – will discuss and describe their experiences as "companion[s] on a journey" to the hurt memory using select excerpts from testimonies they documented, which raise ethical dilemmas. The presenters will share the ethical misgivings that arose during the documentation and listening sessions and raise ethical issues, such as whether and how to document people coping with post-traumatic symptoms. How should their testimonies be published, and should they be censored or accompanied by a warning regarding the mention of atrocities? Is it right to document and publish testimonies of children and adolescents? How should testimonies containing accusations against public figures or bodies be documented and edited?