USC Shoah Foundation is honoring the 78th anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre today by returning to Nanjing to record 20 new testimonies for its Nanjing Massacre collection.

Through a partnership with the National Jewish Theater Foundation, IWitness has added a brand-new activity that guides secondary students to develop historical narrative monologues using testimonies of Holocaust survivors, witnesses and liberators.

You’re never too old to learn about cultural diversity. I realized this over the weekend, on the eve of Hanukkah. My mom, a fourth grade teacher, told me about an incident she’d just experienced at a local party-supply store. She was shopping for her annual Hanukkah lesson, in which she briefly teaches her students the meaning of the holiday, demonstrates how she lights our family menorah, and leads them in a spirited game of dreidel. Everyone goes home with a little bag of chocolate gelt, a dreidel and maybe a Hanukkah-themed pencil.

I found as a teacher that the most challenging task when teaching about the Holocaust and genocide, is how to do it not using material that shocks the students to the point that they do not want to look at the content, study the history or listen to present day issues due to the emotional shut down that can occur.

The IWitness team has added 52 new clips to the Watch page. These clips cover a wide range of topics, from the Armenian Genocide to the Nanjing Massacre.

The 2015 International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling awarded “Best Paper” to the staff of USC Shoah Foundation’s New Dimensions in Testimony project.

As 2015 comes to an end our education team takes a look at the 10 IWitness activities most assigned by educators.

A smartphone app makes it possible to view testimony clips from the Visual History Archive that are linked to the new book Witness: Passing the Torch of Holocaust Memory to New Generations.

A teacher in Hungary used testimony to introduce some of her school’s youngest students to Jewish culture.

Longtime USC Shoah Foundation board member Mickey Shapiro has given a gift to fund an endowed research fellowship program at the Institute’s Center for Advanced Genocide Research in honor of his parents, Sara and Asa Shapiro, who both survived the Holocaust.

USC Shoah Foundation spent seven months researching the identities of every child in the liberation photo of the children behind the barbed wire, and reunited four of them January 26, 2015, in Krakow.

USC Shoah Foundation is sorry to learn of the passing of Aleksander Laks, the first Holocaust survivor to give his testimony to USC Shoah Foundation in Brazil and a special friend of the Institute. Laks passed away July 21 at age 88. Laks survived the Lodz Ghetto, Auschwitz and a death march as a teenager. He immigrated to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and became a leader of the survivor community there as president of the Sherit Hapleita (Holocaust survivors’ organization).

USC Shoah Foundation is saddened to learn of the passing of Johnny Strange, a record-holding adventurer and supporter of USC Shoah Foundation.

USC Shoah Foundation is saddened to learn of the passing of Erna Viterbi, philanthropist and longtime supporter of USC Shoah Foundation. Erna Finci Viterbi, a descendant of Sephardic Jews, was born in Sarajevo but fled Yugoslavia with her family during World War II. They were deported to the Parma region of Italy and interned in the village Gramignazzo di Sissa, but were saved from deportation to the extermination camps by the townspeople. Erna and her family were able to escape to Switzerland for the rest of the war. In 1950, they moved to California.

We are sad to learn of the passing of Thomas Blatt, a Holocaust survivor who was one of the few people to survive an escape from the Sobibor death camp in 1943. He was 88. Born April 15, 1927, in Lublin, Poland, Blatt also served as a witness at the 2009 trial of the camp guard John Demjanjuk.

USC Shoah Foundation is sad to learn of the passing of Sir Nicholas Winton, the organizer of the Czechoslovakian Kindertransport and one of the most beloved rescuers of the Holocaust. Winton was 106 years old.