72 No. 73 JUSTICE initial WhatsApp community into a sophisticated volunteer network. This network encompasses professionals from multiple disciplines: interview conductors, filmmakers, mental health practitioners, video editors, content writers, directors, researchers, translators, and information systems specialists. These volunteers respond to testimony requests from diverse affected populations, including residents of border communities, Nova massacre survivors, Bedouin community members in the Negev, emergency response units, and security forces. The project’s evolution from spontaneous documentation to systematic archiving necessitated the development of a sophisticated technological infrastructure. Central to this infrastructure is a digital knowledge management platform, provided through corporate partnership with Monday.com, which coordinates the activities of over 400 volunteers. This system enables comprehensive tracking of both task management and knowledge accumulation while maintaining rigorous documentation and information security standards. The technological infrastructure integrates several key components working in concert. At its foundation are cloud technologies enabling distributed storage, coupled with sophisticated data management systems. The platform maintains careful recording of metadata to ensure authenticity of all materials, while establishing links to additional information sources including archival records and search systems, which are critical for the preservation of data integrity. Archive Development and Knowledge Creation Since its inception in October 2023, the project has accumulated over 1,400 testimonies. The current publication status includes over 500 testimonies available in both full and short-length versions, with hundreds more in advanced stages of production. The documentation extends beyond verbal testimony to include comprehensive spatial documentation of affected communities through drone and 360-degree camera technology, establishing a foundation for connecting testimonies to both physical and virtual spaces. Under the guidance of researchers from the Hebrew University’s Center for Digital Humanities, the project is developing a collaborative digital archive that adheres to best practices in long-term preservation while maintaining high professional and ethical standards. This development occurs within the context of ongoing events and the management of a decentralized, expanding volunteer organization. The archive’s knowledge modeling encompasses comprehensive mapping and registration of the testimonial world, including witnesses, team members, locations, and organizations. This approach preserves crucial contextual information that might otherwise be lost to time. The registration methodology bridges human and machine understanding by using standard-compliant source registration and explicit entity identification to link testimony content with a priori knowledge. The project has already fostered numerous creative and educational initiatives. Moreover, a team of digital humanists and archivists from the Hebrew University employs computational tools for comprehensive analysis of the testimony collection. This research facilitates the identification of central themes, development of datadriven typologies, and detection of patterns across the archive’s contents. Legal Dimensions of Testimony and Documentation Both legal and documentary testimony draw their legitimacy and authority from the physical, sensory proximity of the witnesses to the events described. It is this proximity that gives the survivors’ testimony its moral weight and intensifies the emotional effect of listening to their account of the attack. Even in an era of advanced documentation technologies on the one hand and unprecedented deep-fake technologies on the other, survivors’ testimonies continue to serve as a central pillar in the struggles and campaigns of civil society organizations against mass atrocities and systematic violations of human rights. The relationship between documentary and legal testimony is complex and multifaceted. While both forms serve to document and preserve accounts of events, they differ fundamentally in their purposes, methodologies, and constraints. Legal testimony is bound by the substantive and procedural limitations of legal proceedings, focusing primarily on facts relevant to specific legal disputes. In contrast, documentary testimony, such as those collected by Edut 710, allows for a more comprehensive narrative approach that encompasses both factual accounts and emotional experiences. The timing of documentary testimony relative to legal proceedings presents both opportunities and challenges. In the context of October 7, many survivors first shared their stories with civilian documentarians before engaging with official investigation authorities. This “documentation race” can serve a complementary function, helping to preserve crucial details while memories are fresh and
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjgzNzA=