Diane and Howard Wohl

Improving International Understanding

Diane Wohl and her husband, Howard, have supported USC Shoah Foundation — The Institute for Visual History and Education since before it became part of the university. They appreciate how the Institute brings people together and, as she puts it, “can slice out all the propaganda and hate with its visual testimonies.”

Their gifts through the Diane and Howard Wohl Family Foundation include recent funding for Teaching with Testimony: Testimony-based Education in France. The Teaching with Testimony programs are used throughout Europe to train educators in fully utilizing the Visual History Archive in their classrooms, including testimonies from the students’ own regions and in their own languages.

The couple also remain actively involved as leaders and supporters of numerous Jewish nonprofits.

Diane Wohl first learned about the Holocaust when she was 10 years old and her mother told her about Anne Frank.

“It was only later in life that I really felt more connected to the Holocaust,” she says. “I wanted to help educate people, to help them understand that the Holocaust was a horrific act that happened to the Jews, but that it also affected 11 million people who were murdered for no other reason than the Nazis didn’t like them.”

The Wohls are confident that USC Shoah Foundation can make a difference at home and abroad.

“This work is vitally important. The Institute knows how to speak to people through education,” she says. “They can chip away at misconceptions and anti-Semitism and really make a difference in people’s thinking. The Institute can also be an important advocate for justice, for all people, for anybody who fights for religious freedom and freedom of any sort, to be able to live a fulfilling life.”