One thousand days after October 7, we have entered a new phase in our relationship with the events of that day.

The urgency of collecting testimony remains. But another challenge has come into view: ensuring that these voices continue to be encountered, studied, taught, and understood long after the moment of testimony has passed.

For generations, those who worked with survivor testimony understood their mission as one of preservation. Record the testimony. Safeguard it. Archive it. Ensure it will not be lost.

That work remains indispensable. But in an era of misinformation, denial, and information overload, preservation alone is no longer enough.

Historical memory is not secured simply because thousands of testimonies have been collected. It endures because people can continue to engage with them: educators preparing lessons, researchers asking new questions, museum curators creating exhibitions, artists seeking to interpret lived experience, and future generations trying to understand events they did not witness themselves.

This is what I mean by a living archive of the present.

A living archive of the present is not simply a repository where testimonies are stored. It is an archive created while history is still unfolding, in close proximity to the events it documents and amid conditions of ongoing uncertainty, trauma, and emergency. At the same time, it is designed to remain active: enabling authentic voices to continue speaking across time,........

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