There are no words that can adequately convey our grief, outrage, and sorrow. The barbaric crimes committed against Israeli civilians this week have shocked us all. As we continue to uncover the brutality of the attacks perpetrated by Hamas, including more than 1,300 murders, untold numbers of those abducted and violated, and the many more who have been traumatized by these crimes, we are deeply concerned for our friends and relatives in danger. Our hearts break for the families who fear for the safety of loved ones, and we grieve alongside those who have experienced unspeakable loss.

Over the past several days, I have been in touch with many members of the Trojan Family who voiced their pain and despair in the wake of the unprecedented terrorist attacks in Israel. We mourn the shocking loss of life. We condemn the terrorist attacks by Hamas and their brutal threats to execute kidnapped civilians and commit other atrocities.

Dear Friends, I am writing to you with profound sorrow. The murderous attack that occurred in Israel was an act of antisemitism in its most depraved form by a genocidal regime in Gaza sponsored by Iran, a country that repeatedly calls for the destruction of Israel. There can be no moral equivalence. “From the river to the sea” has only one meaning–the elimination of Israel. This was a massacre of people for only one reason—they were Jews.

The USC Shoah Foundation is recording testimonies of survivors of the Hamas terror attacks in Israel as part of a major initiative launched days after October 7, when 1,400 people were massacred and some 250 taken hostage.

For more than a year, tensions and fighting in and on the border of the Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) have grown in intensity. In part the result of the nature of the region’s creation under the Soviets in the 1920s, this has had a disastrous effect on the 120,000 ethnic Armenians who call Nagorno-Karabakh home.

In the aftermath of the October 7 Hamas terrorist attacks in southern Israel, the USC Shoah Foundation and Tablet Studios announced a partnership to collect, archive, and make available testimonies of survivors, bereaved family members, and rescuers who risked their lives to save others during the assault.

The USC Shoah Foundation mourns the August 3, 2023 passing of Nimrod “Zigi” Ariav, a Holocaust survivor who fought in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising and Israel’s War of Independence before becoming a leader in the Israeli aeronautics industry. He was a longtime supporter of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. He was 96. 

In the moments before Shaylee Atary Winner escaped from her home in the early morning hours of October 7, she saw her husband fighting to close the iron window grates in their safe room over the hand of a terrorist who was reaching in. With a glance, Shaylee and her husband silently agreed she would take their baby and run.

Ben Ferencz, the last remaining prosecutor from the Nuremberg 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.

We are grateful that so many of these survivors, partners, friends, and family members have entrusted us to share their stories for future generations, and for the passion and dedication they brought in support of our mission.

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.

One morning in 1978, Theary Seng awoke alongside her younger brother in their prison cell in Boeng Rai Security Center, about 100 kilometers south of their hometown of Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The children’s mother had been in the cell the night before, but now she was gone.