USC Shoah Foundation to Host Educator Workshop at JFCS Holocaust Center’s 15th Annual Day of Learning

USC Shoah Foundation will once again be represented at Jewish Family and Children’s Services of San Francisco’s annual Day of Learning on March 19, which brings students and educators together for one day to learn about the Holocaust and other genocides.

Sara Cohan, USC Shoah Foundation’s Armenian education program consultant, will give a presentation for educators called “Women’s Voices: Testimony as a Tool of Empowerment.” The majority of historical narrative is told from the male perspective, but in this workshop Cohan will share effective strategies for using USC Shoah Foundation’s educational website IWitness in the classroom by listening to the testimonies of female survivors who share their stories in their own words.

Presented each spring in San Francisco, more than 700 students and teachers from 120 different schools participate annually in the Day of Learning, held at Galileo Academy of Science & Technology in San Francisco. The event includes survivor speakers, workshops for students grades 7-12, and workshops for teachers. This year’s workshops cover a diverse range of topics, from “Teenage Armed Resistance During the Holocaust” to “Refugees and U.S. Immigrant Policies – Then and Now.”

This year is the 15th annual Day of Learning. USC Shoah Foundation has hosted a workshop about survivor testimony and IWitness at the event for the last several years.

JFCS’s collection of audiovisual Holocaust survivor testimonies is part of USC Shoah Foundation’s Preserving the Legacy initiative, in which Holocaust survivor testimony collections from around the world are integrated into the Visual History Archive. The JFCS collection contains about 1,400 testimonies that were collected in a variety of audiovisual formats in the Bay Area beginning in 1980. The entire collection has now been digitized, indexed and integrated into the Visual History Archive.