In the News
President Promotes USC Shoah Partner in Increasing Internet Access
From the Visual History Archive
Remembering Stefan Kosinski in Honor of LGBT Pride Month
Impact in Profile
Jacqueline Gmach
In the News
President Promotes USC Shoah Partner in Increasing Internet Access
We are living in a digital age, and to help our students get ahead, we must make sure they have access to cutting-edge technology
A key USC Shoah Foundation partner’s mission of upgrading public school access to broadband Internet has earned a boost from President Obama.
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From the Visual History Archive
Remembering Stefan Kosinski in Honor of LGBT Pride Month
June is LGBT Pride Month. In remembrance of the thousands of homosexuals persecuted by the Nazis, we share this clip from Stefan Kosinki’s interview. Stefan speaks of his arrest by the Gestapo in his place of birth, Torun, Poland. Stefan relates how he was interrogated, brutally beaten and subsequently imprisoned as a result of an intercepted letter he wrote to an Austrian soldier in German uniform.
Impact in Profile
Jacqueline Gmach
In a way, it is my story
Born in Tunisia in 1940, Jacqueline Gmach left at the age of 18. Though her family was not directly in danger, the Nazi genocide remains deeply personal to her. She has devoted her career to educating people about its horrors as well as promoting the Jewish culture its executioners tried to obliterate.
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Tuesday, June 18, 2013 - 12:30pm
A key USC Shoah Foundation partner’s mission of upgrading public school access to broadband Internet has earned a boost from President Obama. The nonprofit organization EducationSuperHighway works to ensure that every K-12 school in the nation has the necessary capacity to fully leverage the possibilities offered by digital education and online learning. EducationSuperHighway’s advocacy was instrumental in the president’s announcement of ConnectED, an initiative to connect 99 percent of U.S. students to high-speed Internet within the next five years.
Monday, June 17, 2013 - 12:45pm
The Swedish Embassy today announced funding for an ambitious new Rwanda-wide peace-building program. The Rwanda Peace Education Programme is designed to counter behavioral risk factors for genocide by promoting social cohesion, pluralism, personal responsibility, empathy, critical thinking and action to build a more peaceful society.
Friday, June 14, 2013 - 1:00pm
The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) held its semiannual Plenary meetings in Berlin, Germany from 11-14 June 2013 under the Canadian Chairmans
Thursday, June 13, 2013 - 10:30am
USC Shoah Foundation is partnering with the American Sephardi Federation and other organizations to undertake the Sephardi and Mizrahi Jewish Testimony Collection, a new initiative to document the Sephardi and Mizrahi experience during World War II and the Holocaust.
Wednesday, June 12, 2013 - 12:15pm
Kori Street, PhD, director of education for USC Shoah Foundation, will deliver a presentation about its IWitness Program at the University of Miami’s 12th annual Holocaust Teacher Summer Institute on June 13, 2013. Street’s talk, “Learning to Use Holocaust Survivor Testimony in the Classroom,” will address the program’s value in teaching eyewitness history, as well as its ability to help build digital literacy. The Holocaust Teacher Institute is sponsored by the University of Miami School of Education & Human Development and the Miami Dade County Public Schools.
Tuesday, June 11, 2013 - 12:00pm
Cinemark will hold special screenings of Schindler’s List, with all proceeds benefiting the USC Shoah Foundation—the Institute for Visual History and Education that the film inspired. Participating Cinemark theatres will screen Schindler’s List on Sunday, June 23 at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m., and on Wednesday, June 26, at 2 p.m. and 7:00 p.m.
Monday, June 10, 2013 - 2:45pm
Holocaust survivors from the Bay Area of California who have shared their experiences on video, and in numerous in-person appearances, were recognized for their contributions at a ceremony in San Francisco on June 9, 2013.
Friday, June 7, 2013 - 10:45am
USC Shoah Foundation has granted the Istituto Centrale per i beni sonori ed audiovisivi headquarters in Rome full remote access to its Visual History Archive. The partnership establishes the 43rd access site for the Shoah Foundation around the globe—and the first in Italy.
Monday, June 3, 2013 - 2:00pm
Tenth grade students at Windward School in Mar Vista, California have been piloting a new IWitness activity titled What Can One Voice Tell Us About a Genocide as part of their Global Studies class.
Friday, May 31, 2013 - 12:00pm
USC Shoah Foundation - The Institute for Visual History and Education is pleased to announce its Fellows for 2013/2014 academic year.
The First 10 Years…
2003
The Shoah Foundation completes the indexing of one half of the Foundation's archive, including more than 25,000 English-language testimonies.
The Foundation partners with the Anti-Defamation League in the U.S. and with the Holocaust Educational Trust in the U.K. to create multimedia products to meet the needs of the many educators with whom these organizations already work.
One Human Spirit, the Foundation's first educational video for classrooms, becomes available to United Learning's 22,000 subscriber schools across the United States.
2002
The Foundation establishes an Education department to explore and expand the use of visual history in educational settings. The department is charged with creating educational programs and products for classroom use by students of all ages, and broadening access to the archive.
Remembering for the Present and the Future (the German-language interactive CD-ROM) is now available in five German states reaching approximately one million students.
Broken Silence debuts in the United States, airing on five consecutive nights on Home Box Office's Cinemax channel.
2001
The Foundation announces its new mission: to overcome prejudice, intolerance, and bigotry — and the suffering they cause — through the educational use of the Foundation's Visual History Archive.
Children of the Abyss, the Broken Silence documentary based upon testimonies of child survivors, and other witnesses from the former Soviet Union, is broadcast in Russia – where Holocaust history is rarely taught in schools.
2000
The Foundation completes Broken Silence, a series of five one-hour foreign-language documentaries representing the Holocaust as experienced by survivors from Argentina and Uruguay, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Russia. Each documentary was directed by an award-winning filmmaker native to the country being portrayed.
1999
The Foundation reaches its original goal of collecting 50,000 testimonies.
The Last Days receives the Academy Award® for Best Documentary Feature.
The Last Days companion book debuts in English, French, and German.
1998
The 40,000th testimony is collected. The Foundation expands its outreach and begins collecting in Italy and Greece.
The Foundation releases its first educational CD-ROM, Survivors: Testmonies of the Holocaust, with an accompanying study guide.
The Last Days, the Foundation's first theatrical documentary, premieres at screenings in New York and Los Angeles. The film chronicles the experiences of five Hungarian survivors as they return to their hometowns and the sites where they lived through the Holocaust.
The Lost Children of Berlin is honored with the Edward R. Murrow Award.
1997
The 25,000th testimony is collected – representing 50 percent of the Foundation's collection goal.
The Lost Children of Berlin, the Foundation's second documentary, premieres on the A&E network.
New York's Museum of Jewish Heritage incorporates Foundation testimonies into its exhibit, A Memorial to the Holocaust.
The Foundation records the first testimony of a survivor of Nazi eugenics policies.
1996
The Foundation installs a digital computer system with the capacity to store 50,000 digitized visual history testimonies. The digital indexing of testimonies begins.
Survivors of the Holocaust, the Foundation's first documentary, is released.
The United States Government grants one million dollars to support the Foundation's work.
1995
The Foundation collects its 10,000th testimony. Interviews conducted this year include the first political prisoner, homosexual survivor, and Jehovah's Witness survivor testimonies.
The first multi-national and multi-lingual interviewer training session is held in Amsterdam.
Regional offices open in 16 cities internationally. In its first decade, the Foundation establishes 36 such regional offices.
1994
One year after the Holocaust survivors visit the set of Schindler's List, Steven Spielberg establishes Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation as a nonprofit organization.
The original mission of the Shoah Foundation was to record on videotape the testimonies of 50,000 survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust from around the world for educational purposes before it was too late.
The Foundation's newly-trained interviewers conduct the first interviews, including those of a child survivor, Jewish and non-Jewish resistance group members, a war crimes trial participant, and a liberator.
The first regional offices open in New York and Toronto.