Born Nachman Aaron Elster in 1933, in Poland, Elster escaped persecution and came to the United States in June of 1947. There, he gained an education in Chicago, served in the armed forces during the Korean War, married and had children. To remain in touch with his heritage and to spread awareness about his experiences and lessons learned from the Holocaust, he served as vice president and gave regular talks at the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center.

USC Shoah Foundation and Genesis Philanthropy Group partner to create first Russian-language interactive biographies for award-winning Dimensions in Testimony program.

USC Shoah Foundation Executive Director Stephen Smith will participate in a panel discussion Friday at a special event at the United Nations marking the 70th anniversary of the adoption of international laws to prevent genocide and punish its perpetrators.

Dimensions in Testimony highlights “Speaking Memories,” an exhibit by the organization Jewish Culture in Sweden featuring the voices and stories of Holocaust survivors. The Swedish History Museum also launched access to the 55,000 testimonies in the Institute’s Visual History Archive.

The piece highlights how the interactive biographies will enable future generations to ask questions of and receive immediate answers from pre-recorded images of Holocaust survivors, long after the last of the living witnesses are gone.

Holocaust Museum Houston this weekend will become the fourth museum in the world to permanently display USC Shoah Foundation’s Dimensions in Testimony, which enables viewers to verbally ask questions to a digital projection of survivors, and hear real-time, lifelike responses. The new exhibit features Houston-area Holocaust survivor William J. “Bill” Morgan, a 93-year-old survivor of the Stanislawow Ghetto in western Ukraine.

USC Shoah Foundation is saddened by the recent loss of Eva Kor, a Holocaust survivor who – along with her twin sister – endured cruel experiments conducted on her at Auschwitz, and, half a century later, sparked controversy by publicly forgiving the Nazis who tormented her and killed her parents and two older sisters. She went on to found CANDLES Museum and Education Center in Indiana.

Early this year, when the Swedish History Museum opened its exhibit about the Holocaust – an exhibit that includes USC Shoah Foundation testimonies and some of its interactive biographies – it marked the state-funded museum’s first foray into the topic. The exhibit has been a major success, say two Swedish museum professionals who played a prominent role in the installation, and who came to USC Shoah Foundation’s headquarters in Los Angeles last week to discuss taking the partnership to the next level.

The Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum this month became the second in the world to install a permanent theater to display Dimensions in Testimony – an interactive, holographic project developed by USC Shoah Foundation that will allow visitors to interact with a Holocaust survivor long after they are no longer with us.

Museum Visitors engage with Interactive Biography of Acclaimed Cellist and German-Born Holocaust Survivor Anita Lasker Wallfisch.

USC Shoah Foundation—working with on-site partners National Historical Museums in Sweden and the Institution for Jewish Culture in Sweden—recently began filming two Swedish-language Dimensions in Testimony interviews in Stockholm, Sweden utilizing innovative social distancing and filming techniques.

An Unprecedented Partnership with Orlando Holocaust Museum for Hope & Humanity The Holocaust Memorial Resource & Education Center of Florida has partnered with USC Shoah Foundation to be a content and creative partner in the development of the new Holocaust museum to be located in downtown Orlando. This marks the first time USC Shoah Foundation has teamed with a Holocaust museum as they design, develop, and implement a ground-up and permanent museum-wide exhibition.

As part of USC Shoah Foundation’s collaborations for International Holocaust Remembrance Day, excerpts of seven Dimensions in Testimony interviews are being projected on to the facade of Beit Yaakov – Geneva's Great Synagogue.  Dimensions in Testimony is an initiative by USC Shoah Foundation that enables people to ask questions that prompt real-time responses from pre-recorded video interviews with Holocaust survivors and other witnesses to genocide. 

Two museums have opened installations of Dimensions in Testimony, USC Shoah Foundation's interactive biography series.  In New Orleans, visitors to the National World War II Museum can interact with Staff Sergeant Alan Moskin, the first WWII Liberator filmed for Dimensions in Testimony. Moskin was a member of the 66th Infantry Regiment, 71st Infantry Division, that liberated Gunskirchen concentration camp in Austria. The exhibition runs through July 25, 2021.

The Institute congratulates Lesley Stahl and her 60 Minutes team for winning a 2021 Gracie Award for their segment “Talking to the Past,” which focused on Dimensions in Testimony and featured live as well as virtual interviews with Holocaust survivors, including Pinchas Gutter, Eva Kor, Aaron Elster and Max Eisen.

The Swedish version of USC Shoah Foundation’s Dimensions in Testimony installation was presented in Malmö at the International Forum On Holocaust Remembrance and Combating Antisemitism. Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfvén hosted the event in Malmö on October 13th and visited the installation where he engaged with interactive biographies of two Swedish Holocaust survivors.  King Carl XVI Gustav and Queen Silvia of Sweden attended the forum, where they visited the installation and met with Holocaust survivors.

In February 2012 Holocaust survivor Pinchas Gutter sat down inside a light stage surrounded by 50 cameras and 6,000 LED bulbs to give his testimony to the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive. Gutter’s interview was the first proof of concept of Dimensions in Testimony (DiT), a groundbreaking new technology that enables viewers to pose questions to survivors like Gutter and hear their responses in real-time, lifelike conversation.

Two Holocaust survivors and friends of USC Shoah Foundation, Max Eisen and Dr. Agnes Kaposi, have been recognized by Queen Elizabeth II for their work in Holocaust education. Eisen was appointed to the Order of Canada for his “contributions to Holocaust education, and his promotion of transformational dialogue on human rights, tolerance and respect.”

"It’s very important that the Swedish Holocaust Museum is one of Sweden’s National Historical Museums. We believe the Holocaust is not a Jewish concern, but that it is, and must be, a universal one." Lizzie Oved Scheja (pictured above, full interview below), founder and director of J! Jewish Culture in Sweden, speaking earlier this month after Swedish Minister of Culture Jeanette Gustafsdotter inaugurated the country’s first museum dedicated to preserving and perpetuating the memory of the Holocaust.

Holocaust survivor and USC Shoah Foundation friend Max Eisen passed away earlier this month, leaving a unique legacy forged by harrowing wartime experiences, 20 return trips to Auschwitz-Birkenau as an educator, and the testimony he gave against two SS guards in Germany beginning in 2015.

Inside a Warsaw light stage surrounded by nine cameras, prominent historian and journalist Marian Turski in late June completed the first ever Polish-language Dimensions in Testimony (DiT) interview. Conducted by USC Shoah Foundation and the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw (POLIN), Turski’s interview was a truly international collaboration involving 15 team members from Belgium, Germany, Hungary, Poland, the U.K and the U.S.