A new exhibit at the New York Historical, “The Recordings: Voices from the ‘Shoah’ Tapes,” begins with a statement from Louise Mirrer, the Manhattan museum’s president and CEO.

“It has become a commonplace to lament the rise of antisemitism in the United States,” it reads. Unlike other efforts to combat “the most recent iterations of this ancient scourge,” the new exhibit “takes a different, and in many respects more visceral approach: making audible antisemitism’s history and manifestation in communities during the Holocaust.”

The exhibit features recordings made by and for filmmaker Claude Lanzmann in the 1970s as he prepared what would become his monumental 1985 documentary “Shoah.” Mirrer’s remarks frame the exhibition in the aftermath of Oct. 7, emphasizing the urgent duty to preserve Holocaust memory and teach its lessons today. How audiences understand and apply those lessons is far from settled.

None of the 152 recordings on which this exhibition is based — interviews with survivors, perpetrators and bystanders — appeared in the final film, a nine-and-half hour epic that Roger Ebert described as a “550-minute howl of pain and anger in the face of genocide.” Devoid of archival material and built of patient interviews with often wary witnesses to the Holocaust in Poland, it elevated survivor testimonies as primary historical sources. Both the Fortunoff Video Archive at Yale and Stephen Spielberg’s (now USC’s) Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive were shaped by its ethos.

After Lanzmann’s death in 2018, the tapes of the unused interviews were transferred to the Jewish Museum Berlin and added to the UNESCO Memory of the World Register. In a rare cross-Atlantic collaboration, they are being made public for the first time, with exhibitions opening simultaneously in Berlin and New York.

“This is a very unusual exhibition — almost exclusively audio,” said Mirrer at a press showing this week, a........

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