The Songs From Testimonies project is a musical research and performance based on poems and songs in the interviews with Holocaust survivors recorded at Yale’s Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. The Fortunoff Archive’s collection consists of more than 4,300 video testimonies of Holocaust survivors and witnesses. Consisting of more than 12,000 hours of video material, the testimonies were recorded in more than a dozen different countries and in more than 20 different languages. There are more than 100 testimonies in the collection in which survivors recount poetry or sing musical compositions from the prewar, wartime and postwar periods.

The Fortunoff Archive asked musician-in-residence, Zisl Slepovitch, to locate these songs, conduct research about the origins of each song, and then arrange and record versions with his ensemble, featuring Sasha Lurje.