Sam Gustman, USC Shoah Foundation Chief Technology Officer, reflects on his long friendship with Arnold Spielberg, who passed away August 25 at the age of 103.

This week, we pay tribute to the life and work of Ilia Salita, a key partner and friend to the Institute of many years.

USC Shoah Foundation mourns the loss of Luke Holland who passed away this week, a transformative figure in the field of historical documentation and a dear friend of the Institute. “Luke guided us all to face our pasts—to face our fears—as pathway to living a more informed, peaceful life,” said Stephen Smith, Finci-Viterbi Executive Director of USC Shoah Foundation.

In 2017, Mr. Feingold recorded a more than 4 hour testimony with USC Shoah Foundation as part of the Last Chance Testimony Collection, enabling Holocaust survivors to share their stories for USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive—before it is too late—where they will exist in perpetuity.

USC Shoah foundation is saddened to learn of the recent passing of Anneliese Nossbaum, who survived a Jewish ghetto and three concentration camps.

Anneliese passed away March 23, 2020 after falling ill within weeks of returning from a trip that commemorated the 75-year anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. She was 91.

She was born on January 8, 1929 in Guben, Germany as Anneliese Winterberg.  At the age of two, her family moved to Bonn where her father later became the rabbi of their synagogue.  

The portrait I have been working on of Dario isn’t complete yet, but what an honor it was to have met him and is now to engage with his testimony through the act of painting,” said David Kassan of hi

The Institute is sad to learn that world champion swimmer and Holocaust survivor Éva Székely passed away at 92.

USC Shoah Foundation joins the Hollywood community and people worldwide in mourning the loss of Kirk Douglas, who passed away earlier this week at age 103. Douglas was an acting legend and an icon of the Golden Age of moviemaking, but it was the zeal and empathy that he brought not only to his work as an artist but also to so many humanitarian causes that made him a close friend of USC Shoah Foundation.

Today we mourn the loss of one of our closest friends, Branko Lustig, a Holocaust survivor and two-time Academy Award winner who produced Schindler’s List and played an indispensable role in the founding of USC Shoah Foundation. He was 87.

Shortly after the film’s 1993 release, Lustig -- who witnessed horrific atrocities at Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and other concentration and labor camps -- led the drive to implement Steven Spielberg’s vision of collecting 50,000 Holocaust testimonies for what was then called Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation.

We are saddened to hear of the recent passing of Jack Welner, who survived a Jewish ghetto in Poland, a labor camp near the Dachau concentration camp in Germany, and the Auschwitz Nazi death camp in Poland – where his mother was murdered on arrival – before immigrating to Denver, Colorado, where he began a new life. He was 98.

When Welner gave his testimony to USC Shoah Foundation in 1995, it changed his life.