The Oral History Division (OHD) holds one of the most comprehensive collections of interviews focusing on contemporary Jewish history, Zionism, and Israel. Most of the interviews deposited in the archive were conducted as part of research carried out by researchers and students at the Institute of Contemporary Jewry. Other interviews are based on collaborations with organizations outside the university that have a special interest in developing oral documentation and providing access to the public.

Since its establishment in 1959, the OHD gathered over 10,000 interviews as part of more than 250 projects focusing on various aspects of contemporary Jewish history. The division’s wealth of collections is based on first-hand testimonies from people who experienced the events. The OHD preserves a wide range of research topics related to contemporary Jewry and makes it available to researchers and to the general public.

The first researchers of the Institute of Contemporary Jewry developed their interviewing skills through personal experiment and treated oral history mainly as a tool for collecting historical evidence. Nowadays, oral history has turned into a conventional field of knowledge that requires research and training and is carried out according to professional standards. The OHD manages its collection of interviews collected by researchers for over fifty years and adapts the material to the digital changes. The OHD serves researchers who conduct the interviews as well as the public who uses the collections. Additionally, it offers courses on oral documentation and plays a central role in the Israeli Oral History Association, whose goal is to improve the level of professionalism in the field.  Since 2019, most of the interviews are digitally accessible through the website of the Israeli National Library.

Academic Director: Dr. Martina L. Weisz

_{Martina L. Weisz is the academic director of the Oral History Division at the Avraham Harman Research Institute of Contemporary Jewry, a research fellow at the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, and a researcher at the international research project The Global Pontificate of Pius XII: Catholicism in a Divided World, 1945-1958, funded by the German Max Weber Foundation. She studied Political Science and International Relations at the National University of Rosario in Argentina and completed her doctorate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her first book “Jews and Muslims in Contemporary Spain: Redefining National Borders” was published by De Gruyter Oldenbourg in 2019. She is also the editor, together with Miguel Rivas Venegas, of the collective volume “Marginality and Resistencia. Narratives of Alterity, Dissent, and Belonging in the Spanish-speaking World and beyond”, scheduled to be published by De Gruyter in November 2024. Among her latest publications are the chapters “Argentina and the Jews: Between the Privileges of 'Whiteness' and the Curse of 'Badness' ”, and “Witnessing as Counter-Power: Testimony and Crimes against Humanity in the Argentinean Province of Jujuy,” included in the collective volumes The Routledge History of Antisemitism and Witnessing the Witness of War Crimes, Mass Murder, and Genocide. From the 1920s to the Present (respectively), both published in 2023.}