A three-hour family recording made at a Denver kitchen table in 2008 became the basis for Yasha, a five-episode podcast about Yakov “Yasha” Gendelman’s wartime childhood. His grandson Jeremy Gendelman later developed the project, whose episodes, he said, had accumulated more than 24,000 streams and downloads combined, according to the Baltimore Sun. The show’s website says it debuted at the beginning of September 2026.
The recording captures one family’s account of displacement: Gendelman was a child when his family fled Petrikov, Belarus, in 1941 as Nazi forces advanced. Later, Yasha labored on a Soviet collective farm; he and his family also sheltered in an abandoned circus, according to the podcast’s website. His grandson’s camcorder footage stayed unused for years before Jeremy returned to it and began shaping the material into a series, the Buzzsprout creator feature reports.
A personal recording, and the work of preservation
Turning an old recording into a podcast is not the same as preserving it for the long term. The Library of Congress says personal audiovisual collections require conversion and maintenance in a current digital format, alongside preservation of the physical objects. That is general guidance, not evidence of the specific preservation steps taken with Gendelman’s tapes, according to the Library of Congress. The Sun reported that Jeremy converted the camcorder recordings into digital audio files at a local library.
There is also a demographic backdrop to preserving first-person testimony. The Claims Conference’s 2025 report said the median age of Jewish Holocaust survivors was 87 at publication; it reported that half lived in Israel, 18 percent in North America and 17 percent in Western Europe. Those figures describe the population covered by that report, not the age or circumstances of any one person whose testimony is recorded.
Different projects preserve different kinds of testimony
Family recordings sit alongside, but are distinct from, organized testimony archives. The USC Shoah Foundation says it was founded to record and preserve Holocaust survivors’ voices, which now number more than 60,000. The foundation also describes a separate project, Dimensions in Testimony, which lets people ask questions and receive real-time responses from prerecorded interviews with survivors and other witnesses to genocide.
Other public archives have narrower remits: the Library of Congress’s Veterans History Project collects personal accounts from U.S. military veterans and Gold Star Families, rather than serving as a general archive for civilian survivors’ stories. These projects illustrate different approaches and scopes; they do not establish that Gendelman’s family recording belongs to any institutional collection.
Jeremy developed the podcast over roughly three years, researching its historical setting and working with sound designer Carter Wogahn, according to the Sun. The result brings one family’s recorded memory to listeners while leaving the original footage’s preservation and archival status separate questions.
