Under an assumed identity, Joseph André Scheinmann ran a French Resistance network of 300 agents that funneled information to the British. After his arrest and internment, he continued his scheming to save the lives of 100s of fellow prisoners.

Phil Scheinman didn’t know he had close relatives who survived the Holocaust until he saw the testimony of André Scheinmann, a cousin he calls the “Jewish James Bond”. Phil created a movie that brought together 400 family members — many of them newly discovered — to learn how André ran a network of 300 agents for the French Resistance and, even after he was sent to concentration camp, helped save dozens of lives.

USC Shoah Foundation partner and celebrated pianist Mona Golabek is scheduled to bring her livestreamed theatrical performance and concert to students and educators in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut at two signature events later this month.

USC Shoah Foundation has added 132 testimonies to its Visual History Archive. These firsthand accounts of mass atrocities spanning more than 100 years are now available to researchers, educators, family members, and the public.

A distinguished voice of history has been lost today in the passing of Auschwitz survivor Roman Kent, who captured the agony of the Holocaust and the power of love in his telling of a simple story about his childhood dog, Lala. Kent was 92.

Fifteen hours of interviews related to a group of World War II-era diplomats who defied official policies to save hundreds of thousands of people from the Holocaust are to be integrated into the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive.

USC Shoah Foundation and Mona Golabek had an end-of-school-year gift for Zoomed-out teachers: a 30-minute, all-inclusive concert/history lesson/social-emotional learning tutorial with messages about learning from history, rising from injustice and overcoming adversity.

On the day that Faye Schulman’s parents and siblings were killed, along with almost all the Jews of her Eastern Polish town of Lenin, Schulman (then Faigel Lazebnik) was pulled aside by a Nazi officer. The Nazi official had been to Schulman’s studio a few weeks previously. After invading the town in 1942, the Nazis had ordered the talented young photographer to take photographs—both to document their activities in the town and to provide their officers with vanity portraits. Schulman remembered the photo session with the Nazi who now pulled her aside.

Anna Heilman and a group of young women smuggled gunpowder to blow up an Auschwitz crematorium. Some of them were caught. Their story lives on in Anna’s testimony.

President Joe Biden on Thursday signed legislation into law establishing June 19 as Juneteenth National Independence Day—a US federal holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. USC will host an online event on June 19 to commemorate Juneteenth and celebrate Black heritage through student tributes, artistic performances and various speakers.

The Institute congratulates Lesley Stahl and her 60 Minutes team for winning a 2021 Gracie Award for their segment “Talking to the Past,” which focused on Dimensions in Testimony and featured live as well as virtual interviews with Holocaust survivors, including Pinchas Gutter, Eva Kor, Aaron Elster and Max Eisen.

USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of Fritzie Fritzshall, president of the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center, whose story of survival and will to share it has inspired thousands of people. She was 91. Always hopeful and optimistic, Fritzie’s understanding of where hate and intolerance can lead if left unchecked has driven her her whole life to educate and empower everyone she meets. She will be dearly missed.

A group of 30 second-grade children in New York City took part in a Tour for Tolerance event earlier this month that featured a virtual read-along given by famed broadcaster and Holocaust survivor Dr. Ruth Westheimer. Delivered virtually to students at the Glenn Morris School (PS100) in Queens, New York, the program was a pilot initiative of Tour for Tolerance and USC Shoah Foundation.

Actor, director, filmmaker and advocate Yuval David has a weapon of choice he employs to attract audiences and disarm would-be haters: a positive embrace of his story and a persistent belief in humanity.

Theogene Kayitakire, a sergeant in the Rwandan Patriotic Army, helped capture the strategic high ground of the Mount Rebero neighborhood in Kigali in April 1994, just days after the Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda had begun. With the location secure and reinforcements arriving, Theogene had a request for his command: Could he go to save his relatives nearby? When given permission, he disguised himself in a government army uniform and, with a few other soldiers, went to find his uncle. But his uncle refused to flee to safety without his neighbors.

Rukesha’s testimony, along with six other interviews from The 600 documentary, was recently integrated into USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, which now holds 135 indexed and searchable interviews connected to the Genocide Against the Tutsi Rwanda. The majority of these testimonies were collected by Aegis Trust and the Kigali Genocide Memorial, in partnership with USC Shoah Foundation. The seven new testimonies include the first accounts of Rwandan liberators to be added to the collection.

“How the Holocaust’s Jewish Calendars Bear Witness” Alan Rosen (Recipient of the 2020 Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research) April 21, 2021

Graduates of the Teaching with Testimony in the 21st Century professional development program came together last month to celebrate the program's 10th anniversary in Hungary. The event took place June 28-30th to commemorate the program's success and chart new opportunities for its graduates.

Carson Sizemore is already bracing for the tough conversations she will have in her 10th grade government class at her private high school in Albany, a small city on the banks of the Flint River in southwest Georgia. “I kind of have conflicting ideas with a lot of people in my family and my school. They’re more conservative, and I’m more in the middle somewhere,” Carson said. “I know there will be some debates in my government class.”

USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of Ruth Pearl, mother of slain Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl and co-founder and CFO of The Daniel Pearl Foundation, which promotes cross-cultural understanding through journalism and music.

Suzy Ressler, a survivor of Auschwitz who parlayed her family’s old-world recipes into the Philadelphia-based Mrs. Ressler’s Food Products, died July 3, 2021, at the age of 93. She was remembered for her business savvy, her warmth and generosity, and her impeccable elegance.

USC Shoah Foundation and the Maimonides Institute for Medicine, Ethics and the Holocaust are partnering to develop new and innovative educational programing on medical ethics and the Holocaust. The Holocaust marked a profound and sadistic deviation from traditional notions of medical ethics, with medical and scientific communities in the Third Reich actively participating in the labeling, persecution and eventual mass murder of millions deemed “unfit.”

On August 2, 1944, nearly 3,000 Roma and Sinti women, men and children were murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

There is gratitude deep inside of grief. A feeling of, how lucky was I to have this friendship at all. That’s how I feel about my dear Rabbi Bent Melchior who passed away in Copenhagen on July 28, 2021. He was 92-years-old.

For decades Nathan Poremba deflected his son Joel’s questions about his experiences as a child during the Holocaust. But when an interview with USC Shoah Foundation inspired Nathan to talk, Joel could not bear to face his father’s past. It would take a fateful trip to Israel 20 years later to bring the two together to explore the story.

The documentary Two Sides of Survival just landed Winner of Best Documentary Short at the Angeles Film Festival. Produced by USC Shoah Foundation, Two Sides of Survival brings together stories from the East and West, chronicling how Jews who fled the Nazis in Europe, and Chinese who were threatened by Japanese occupation, improbably found refuge close to one another in the 1930’s and during World War II.

USC Shoah Foundation today launches its 2021-2022 Back to School package, a suite of testimony-based resources on IWitness to help educators navigate the complex issues created by the Covid-19 pandemic and surfaced by the recent upsurge in social movements demanding racial justice. This year’s classroom activities and educator professional development modules are based on testimony from the Visual History Archive that help students to critically evaluate historical context, consider various perspectives and impacts, and reflect on personal connections.

Claire Denault’s Southern California private high school had a problem with classism. So she decided to approach the issue in a way she knew would resonate with her peers: through story. As the student government leader who facilitated a weekly school-wide forum, she invited students to anonymously submit testimonies and personal accounts about how they had been disenfranchised or marginalized because of their socioeconomic status. Claire and other students read those narratives at town hall, and intense dialogue followed—that day and for weeks after.

USC Shoah Foundation is looking for 40 students across the country in 7th– 11th grades representative of diverse backgrounds and academic skills who are interested in participating in its highly competitive William P. Lauder Junior Internship Program. The program provides a dynamic and unique learning opportunity to engage with testimonies – personal stories – from survivors and witnesses of genocide to develop their own voice.

A four-year initiative to bring together the expertise of USC Shoah Foundation and the Azrieli Foundation—Canada’s leading nationwide Holocaust education program—has culminated with the release of a robust new destination for teachers and students with a variety of bilingual educational materials based on the memoirs and testimonies of Canadian Holocaust survivors.