Between 1938 and 1940 an estimated 17,000 mostly Austrian and German Jews traveled from Europe to Shanghai, many on luxury liners. They were escaping the upsurge of violent antisemitism in Europe and headed primarily to Shanghai, at the time one of the few places in the world without any immigration barriers.

Ben Ferencz, the last remaining prosecutor from the Nuremburg Trials who passed away in Florida earlier this month, gave countless interviews over the course of his illustrious career.

But surely none was longer, or more technically challenging, than the three-day testimony he gave to USC Shoah Foundation at the height of the Covid pandemic in July 2020.

The need for social distancing necessitated that filming be done remotely, with boxes of sophisticated equipment shipped to Ferencz’s modest Florida home.

Gerald Szames is 2, maybe 3 years old. He is standing at the foot of the bed, looking at his mother. She is sick, propped up on a pile of pillows. He has other flashes of memories of life before the Nazis invaded his Polish shtetl of Trochenbrod in 1941, when he was four years old – his grandfather taking him to the mill, his father lifting him up to give him a candy and a kiss.

Gerald Szames chokes up easily, especially when talking about his mother. So for years, his daughter has taken it upon herself to tell her father’s story of surviving the Holocaust as a small boy. She speaks to audiences at schools, houses of worship and community centers, often with her father by her side to answer questions. 

Fifteen hours of interviews describing the actions of a group of World War II-era diplomats who defied official policies to save tens of thousands of lives during the Holocaust have been added to USC Shoah Foundation’s 55,000-strong Visual History Archive (VHA) thanks to a collaboration with the Andrew J. & Joyce D. Mandell Family Foundation.

California Governor Gavin Newsom recently declared that Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day—observed annually on April 24—will become a statewide holiday to be known as Genocide Awareness Day.

July 11 marks 26 years since the Srebrenica genocide, the biggest in a cluster of massacres that occurred as part of the campaign of ethnic cleansing in eastern parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina during the 1992-1995 war in the country.

It’s the day in 1995 that Bosnian Serb forces led by General Ratko Mladic overran the enclave of Srebrenica, the town in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina the United Nations had formally designated as a “safe area” in 1993. 

On a Wednesday morning in New York in the fall of 2021, Rabbi Nicole Auerbach greeted Walter and Phyllis Loeb in Central Synagogue’s majestic sanctuary. She led them through the arch-lined nave, past row after row of pews, beyond the six sets of capital columns wrapped in colorful, gold-accented reliefs, all the way up to the intricately carved Mahagony bima, the stage where the synagogue’s rabbi and cantor preside over Shabbat and holiday services.

"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.

Hundreds of survivors of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide against the Tutsi congregated in Salt Lake City over the weekend for the largest-ever international gathering of survivors.

Organizers say the event, hosted by IBUKA-USA and supported by a number of organizations including USC Shoah Foundation, was a safe space for survivors to discuss issues including bringing genocide perpetrators to justice, preserving the memory of victims, and fighting against revisionism.