The story of the Baltimore Jewish Council's Holocaust Survivor Testimonies project begins in 1979, when a Connecticut organization, the Holocaust Survivors Film Project, Inc., first considered the potential of video as a medium for preserving the stories of Holocaust survivors. In 1981, over 200 interviews from this project were deposited at Yale University. When staff of the Baltimore Jewish Council learned of this project, they were inspired to take similar action to preserve the stories of survivors in the Baltimore area.

Their own project began in 1988 with an advertisement, published in the Baltimore Jewish Times, requesting volunteers from the community to facilitate these interviews. These interviewers were trained by faculty from the Baltimore Hebrew University and Yale Archives, while interviewees were selected and contacted from lists of Holocaust survivors living in the area. The taping of the first interview was conducted in December of 1988, and the project continued until December of 1994, recording 142 testimonies.

Froma Willen was hired as coordinator of the project in June of 1989. She worked with the project for nearly six years, until, at the end of 1994, the project was discontinued due to declining interest and the creation of the Survivors of the Shoah Foundation, a large-scale organization founded by Steven Spielberg and dedicated to interviewing Holocaust survivors. Following the conclusion of the project, Willen remained an active volunteer at the Baltimore Jewish Council.

While Towson's Special Collections and Archives holds videocassette copies of the interviews conducted for this project, digital versions can be viewed through the Yale Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimones, as well as the original Connecticut interviews and others conducted by similar regional groups. Towson University functions as one of several online access sites for these videos, and researchers can request viewing access via Cook Library's computers.