This summer, USC Shoah Foundation education team hosted their annual Leadership Workshop—Action and Values presented by the William P. Lauder Junior Internship Program.

The workshop calls for applicants who are preparing themselves to be in leadership positions in their communities. The focus is to cultivate, through the power of testimony, the confidence and courage to be an upstander. Testimonies, with their powerful universal messages, instill in students the importance of personal stories, values, and agency.

USC Shoah Foundation is saddened to learn of the recent passing of Sol Gringlas, who survived both the Nordhausen and Auschwitz concentration camps.

Sol passed away in May of 2020. He was 100.

Born on August 22, 1919 in Ostrowiec, Poland, Sol lived in an apartment with his parents, four brothers and a sister. His parents worked together in a local shop selling shoes. He grew up in an observant household that had Friday night dinners, lit Sabbath candles, attended Shul and prayed together.

Wilma Bulkin Siegel was seven years old in 1945 when her father took her to the movies to watch newsreels of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps.

“Why couldn’t I have done something about it?” she whispered to her father.

Decades later, Siegel, a retired New York City oncologist and a pioneer in hospice care, has discovered a new tool for making an impact: a paintbrush.

USC Shoah Foundation has partnered with JewishGen.org, an affiliate of the Museum of Jewish Heritage - A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, to integrate an index of data from nearly 50,000 Jewish Holocaust survivor testimonies found in the Visual History Archive® into the JewishGen Holocaust database.