Stephen D. Smith

Stephen D. Smith OBE is a Holocaust specialist who has started, operated and consulted on many different Holocaust memorial centres.

Smith was born on 15 April 1967, the son of a Methodist minister.

In 1995, he founded the UK Holocaust Centre in Nottinghamshire with his brother James M Smith, and together they also founded Aegis Trust in 2000.

He graduated from the University of London in 1991 with a degree in Theology, and received his Doctorate from the University of Birmingham in 2000, having focussed his postgraduate study on the "Trajectory of Memory", examining how Holocaust survivor testimony developed over time.

Smith has consulted on the development of a number of Holocaust memorial and education centres overseas, including Lithuania's House of Memory and the Cape Town Holocaust Centre in South Africa, which was heavily inspired by a visit from the founder, Myra Osrin, to the UK Holocaust Centre.

In 2004, Smith was project Director of the Kigali Memorial Centre, the genocide memorial museum and education centre in Kigali, Rwanda. Aegis was commissioned by Kigali City Council to establish the Kigali Memorial Centre, which opened in 2004 and still operates today.

Smith is a member of the United States delegation to the Inter-governmental Taskforce on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research (ITF), founded by Sweden, the US and the UK on the personal initiative of the then Swedish Prime Minister, Goran Persson. He was a member of the British delegation from 1998, when the ITF was founded, moving to the American delegation in 2009 following appointment to the USC Shoah Foundation Institute (see below). Over 20 countries are now part of the ITF. Smith was an advisor to Goran Persson's series of intergovernmental conferences, the Stockholm International Forum. The four conferences addressed, The Holocaust (2000); Combatting Intolerance (2001), Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation (2002), Preventing Genocide (2004).

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