Hungarian ethics teachers and Polish educators were introduced this spring to IWalk, USC Shoah Foundation’s educational program that combines testimony with real-life locations, and are interested in incorporating it into their teaching.  

For the sixth time, the Freie Universität Berlin will offer a free summer course for international and visiting scholars about USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive. This summer, the topic of the course is memories of the Nazis’ forced laborers.

Despite the current political turmoil in their country, six teachers from Crimea traveled to Kyiv last month for a seminar on oral history and USC Shoah Foundation’s Where Do Human Rights Begin teacher’s guide, led by Ukraine international consultant Anna Lenchovska.

In the Spring 2014 issue of PastForward, Mukesh Kapila discusses the benefits and challenges of collecting testimonies in real time as events are unfolding.

The Problems Without Passports trip to Rwanda ends today after a busy second week that included visits to some of Rwanda’s most stunning nature sites and opportunities for the students to meet politicians and international representatives.

A forgotten forced labor camp for Jews in Czech Republic has been rediscovered as a result of research conducted in the Visual History Archive by Marcel Mahdal, a graduate of USC Shoah Foundation’s Teaching with Testimony in the 21st Century program.

Stephen Smith, executive director of the USC Shoah Foundation, presented USC Shoah Foundation’s educational work at the 9th annual International Conference on Holocaust Education at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem this week.

Dozens of Echoes and Reflections professional development seminars and workshops will be held across the country over the summer months, providing educators the opportunity to learn about teaching the Holocaust through testimony and the most up-to-date pedagogical strategies.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has paved the way for better Wi-Fi in schools by modernizing its E-Rate program, the nation’s largest program for supporting communications technology in schools and libraries.

The 53,000 testimonies in the Visual History Archive from the USC Shoah Foundation tell a complete personal history of life before, during and after the interviewee’s firsthand experience with genocide. These testimonies are an invaluable resource for humanity, as in addition to their experience through some of the darkest chapters of human history; the testimonies also recount happy memories of childhood and successes in life including careers, children and grandchildren. 

Steve Kay, dean of the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, believe that the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive holds many keys to unlocking the enigmatic conditions that have led to genocides throughout history.

Six months after it launched, the online guest book has gathered a remarkable collection of messages from people who have been affected by testimony. All are encouraged to sign the guest book until Dec. 31, 2014.

The University of Michigan- Flint held its second annual Workshop on Teaching and Working with Survivor Testimonies this week, which included exploration of Rwandan and Holocaust survivor testimonies.

On July 16 -17, 1942, over 13,000 Jews from Paris and its suburbs were rounded up by French police in the early morning hours and forcefully taken from their homes to both the Vélodrome d’Hiver, a winter cycling stadium in Paris, and to the Drancy internment camp.

Some of the brightest college students in applied mathematics are working with the USC Shoah Foundation this summer for the annual Research in Industrial Projects (RIPS) program at the UCLA Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM).

The statistics are rolling in: Thousands of rockets fired, thousands of homes destroyed, 65,000 reservists deployed, hundreds of Palestinian and tens of Israeli dead, miles of print, hours of commentary, two ceasefires. But for all our statistics, are we not missing one fundamental point? No one is suffering more at the hands of Hamas than the ordinary people of Gaza.

Development took a major step forward this month for New Dimensions in Testimony, the three-dimensional, fully interactive display of Holocaust survivors created by USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies and Conscience Display. Audiences had the chance to interact with the pilot for the first time.

Young people working to promote peace in Rwanda as part of the Aegis Trust Youth Champion program are turning to IWitness to aid in their projects.

The number of people who watched testimony in the 2013-14 fiscal year more than doubled from last year, USC Shoah Foundation’s year-end statistics reveal. And that’s just one of many impressive numbers that show how USC Shoah Foundation continues to grow its influence around the world.

Harry Reicher, USC Shoah Foundation’s first-ever Rutman Teaching Fellow, wrapped up his four-day fellowship today with a talk that revealed how exceptionally valuable the Visual History Archive will become to his teaching.

In just a few short months I will be holding a new born baby in my arms. The depth and complexity of emotion that I feel as this time approaches is multiplied by the experiences I have had working at USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education. New acquaintances who inquire about what I do for a living often respond by saying, “Gosh, that must be depressing.” And my response has always been the same, “Actually, it is amazing and inspiring.” And it truly is.

The second IWitness educator workshop in Rwanda will be held next week, and will incorporate new elements to provide an experience unique from the first workshop last November.

In the Spring 2014 issue of PastForward, USC screenwriting professor Ted Braun discusses Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing and what it brings to our understanding of violence.

Alexovics Ingrid írása a vizuális archívumok oktatási célú felhasználásának lehetőségeiről

Students may still be enjoying their summer vacation, but the new school year is just around the corner. USC Shoah Foundation has prepared a convenient one-stop-shop of all its educational resources to help educators plan to teach with testimony this year.

USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education was founded to capture the voices, emotions and faces of those who suffered, yet miraculously survived the most heinous crime ever committed against humanity by humanity. The idea was to record individual and collective memories that would be preserved in perpetuity as a seminal educational tool to inform current and future generations that incitement, hate and violence against a person or a group can ultimately lead to death, genocide and ultimately extermination.

A series of Croatian-language Holocaust lessons commissioned in 2006 by the Croatian Ministry of Science, Education and Sports is now available on USC Shoah Foundation’s website. The lessons draw on testimony to teach various aspects of the Holocaust in Croatia.

To honor this remarkable man and visionary scholar, the Institute gratefully re-posts his profile below. During the brief week that Harry spent with us here in Los Angeles this past July as our inaugural Rutman Teaching Fellow, he managed to touch and inspire all of our staff and friends of the Institute who worked with him and who heard his public lecture.