USC Shoah Foundation has granted the Istituto Centrale per i beni sonori ed audiovisivi headquarters in Rome full remote access to its Visual History Archive.

Holocaust survivors from the Bay Area of California who have shared their experiences on video, and in numerous in-person appearances, were recognized for their contributions at a ceremony in San Francisco on June 9, 2013.

Cinemark will hold special screenings of Schindler’s List, with all proceeds benefiting the USC Shoah Foundation—the Institute for Visual History and Education that the film inspired. Participating Cinemark theatres will screen Schindler’s List on Sunday, June 23 at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m., and on Wednesday, June 26, at 2 p.m. and 7:00 p.m.

Kori Street, PhD, director of education for USC Shoah Foundation, will deliver a presentation about its IWitness Program at the University of Miami’s 12th annual Holocaust Teacher Summer Institute on June 13, 2013. Street’s talk, “Learning to Use Holocaust Survivor Testimony in the Classroom,” will address the program’s value in teaching eyewitness history, as well as its ability to help build digital literacy. The Holocaust Teacher Institute is sponsored by the University of Miami School of Education & Human Development and the Miami Dade County Public Schools.

USC Shoah Foundation is partnering with the American Sephardi Federation and other organizations to undertake the Sephardi and Mizrahi Jewish Testimony Collection, a new initiative to document the Sephardi and Mizrahi experience during World War II and the Holocaust.

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) held its semiannual Plenary meetings in Berlin, Germany from 11-14 June 2013 under the Canadian Chairmanship. 

The Swedish Embassy today announced funding for an ambitious new Rwanda-wide peace-building program.  The Rwanda Peace Education Programme is designed to counter behavioral risk factors for genocide by promoting social cohesion, pluralism, personal responsibility, empathy, critical thinking and action to build a more peaceful society.

A key USC Shoah Foundation partner’s mission of upgrading public school access to broadband Internet has earned a boost from President Obama. The nonprofit organization EducationSuperHighway works to ensure that every K-12 school in the nation has the necessary capacity to fully leverage the possibilities offered by digital education and online learning. EducationSuperHighway’s advocacy was instrumental in the president’s announcement of ConnectED, an initiative to connect 99 percent of U.S. students to high-speed Internet within the next five years.

USC Shoah Foundation and the Armenian Film Foundation have announced a new joint goal: By the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide in 2015, they will integrate into the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive the more than 400 interviews of survivors of the genocide that were filmed by the late Dr. J.

Testimonies of survivors and witnesses of the 1994 Rwandan Tutsi Genocide added to USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive have resulted in 500 new search terms for the archive’s indexing system. The index is a controlled vocabulary of more than 50,000 terms that make up the Shoah Foundation’s Thesaurus and that allow detailed searching of the testimonies in the archive.

June 18 saw the U.S. premiere of a set of piano variations on a Polish patriotic theme composed in the Dachau concentration camp by prisoner of war Leon Kaczmarek (1903–1973). Kaczmarek’s composition was performed by 17-year-old pianist Nicholas Biniaz-Harris, winner of the National Symphony Orchestra’s 2013 Young Soloists’ Competition.

Winter seminar focuses on future of survivor testimonyRepresentatives from more than 30 Holocaust museums and centers in the United States and Canada came to Los Angeles this week for the 2013 Association of Holocaust Organizations (AHO) Winter Seminar, hosted for the first time by USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education.

The inaugural meeting of the Rwandan Peace Education Program brought together survivors of the Rwandan Tutsi Genocide and the Holocaust, along with other activists from around the world.

On June 6, Steven Spielberg, Founder of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute, presented Robert A. Iger, Chairman and CEO of The Walt Disney Company, with the Institute’s highest honor, the Ambassador for Humanity Award. Iger was honored at the Institute’s annual gala, where he was recognized for his support of the Institute’s work, his longtime philanthropy, and his leadership role in corporate citizenship. The gala presenting sponsor was jcpenny. Jimmy Kimmel hosted, and Mary J. Blige gave a special musical performance.

The Sarah and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre in Toronto has introduced USC Shoah Foundation’s online educational tool, IWitness, to Canadian teachers and students, marking the beginning of the Neuberger Centre’s use of IWitness as part of its educational programming.

USC Shoah Foundation has created a new leadership group to help bolster its strategic goals, programs, and activities. The Next Generation Council will be composed of community and business leaders, entertainment and media trendsetters, philanthropists, and social entrepreneurs from across the country, as well as children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors.

USC Shoah Foundation recently hosted a number of eminent guests from the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles. They included: Jerry Coben, a member of the federation’s board of directors in addition to being an emeritus member of the USC Shoah Foundation Board of Councilors; Jay Sanderson, president and chief executive officer; Andrew Cushnir, executive vice president and chief programming officer; and Shira Rosenblatt, vice president of Jewish education and engagement.

Karen Jungblut, USC Shoah Foundation director of research and documentation, participated in the “Digital Testimonies on War and Trauma” conference in June. Held at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands, the symposium brought together scholars from all over the world to address the use and impact of digitized narrative collections in relating the horrors of warfare.

Aristides de Sousa Mendes may not be a familiar name, but several people, along with their descendants, who owe their lives to him, are working to change that.

Echoes and Reflections, a professional teacher development program on the Holocaust, has now expanded to Alaska. In April, middle and high school educators from across the state journeyed to Kodiak High School on Kodiak Island to participate. In addition to those attending in person, others in remote locations joined via video conferencing.

Crispin Brooks, curator of USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, will deliver a presentation at the Teaching and Working with Holocaust Testimonies Summer 2013 Workshop, to be held July 15–19 at the University of Michigan–Flint. Geared toward high school teachers, college faculty, and graduate students, the conference focuses on information literacy and critical skills in education and research involving online Holocaust survivor video testimonies. The Visual History Archive is a special focus of the event.

USC Shoah Foundation educator workshops continue increasing in number and reach. This summer, the program Teaching with Testimony in the 21st Century convened new seminars in Budapest and Prague. In addition, another workshop in Poland is scheduled for November. The program’s offerings draw participants from all across their respective nations.

Professor Andrea Pető of Central European University in Budapest has written an article about how to use USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive in teaching students at the graduate level. The piece appears as a chapter in the seventh volume of Jewish Studies at the Central European University edited by András Kovács and Michael Laurence Miller.

Four applied mathematics undergraduate students are dedicating their summer to a major research project for the USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education.

Június 3O-a és július 5-e között rendezte a USC Soá Alapítvány a Videóinterjúk a 21. század oktatásában című, magyarországi tanárképzési programjának második évfolyamát. A program segítségével a résztvevő tanárok megismerhetik a videóinterjúkkal való tanítás lehetőségét, és megtanulhatják, hogyan illeszthetik be az interjúkat eredményesen pedagógiai munkájukba.

2O13. július 5-7-g tartottuk a Videóinterjúk a 21. század oktatásában című tanárképzés első évfolyamának (2O12) programzáró találkozóját a budapesti Közép-európai Egyetemen.A program részeként a kollégák meghallgathatták ruandai vendégünk, Appolon Gahungayire előadását arról, hogyan használhatók a Vizuális Törtnelmi Archívum interjúi az oktatásban Ruandában, illetve Kovács András professzor, antiszemitizmus-kutató előadásában a mai magyarországi antiszemitizmus jelenségéről beszélgettek.

Teachers from all over Hungary gathered in Budapest this month for the six-day introductory seminar to the USC Shoah Foundation’s 2013 Teaching with Testimony for the 21st Century program. But there was one educator among them who didn’t just travel across the country – he came from the other side of the world.

USC Shoah Foundation is currently fundraising for New Dimensions in Testimony, a new project being developed in concert with USC Institute for Creative Technologies and Conscience Display. The project is to capture three-dimensional interviews with a number of survivors so that in the future people will enable to engage with them conversationally.

By Nora Snyder

Claudia Ramirez Wiedeman, PhD, has joined USC Shoah Foundation as Associate Director for Educational Technologies and Training. Her duties include strategic, content, and professional development related to the Institute’s flagship web-based educational tool, IWitness, which is designed to make the Visual History Archive accessible to educators and students around the world.