Contest challenges secondary school students to honor the legacy of Schindler’s List by engaging in community service inspired by survivors’ testimonies and showcasing their action in an IWitness video essay

Three professional-development videos for secondary-school teachers are now available on the Institute’s website. The videos, which average 25 minutes in length, delve into the theory and practice of using testimony for education and digital tools such as IWitness.

On February 2, we commemorated the 70th anniversary of the decisive WWII Battle of Stalingrad. That battle changed the course of the war, leading to the final victory over Nazi Germany. As many as two million lives may have been lost at Stalingrad. We invite you to watch edited and subtitled clips from testimonies of three Red Army veterans who participated in the frontline fighting. The Visual History Archive of USC Shoah Foundation contains interviews with hundreds of Allied liberators and Jewish war veterans from all fronts of WWII.

2 февраля мы отметили 70-летие решающей битвы Второй мировой войны под Сталинградом. Эта битва изменила ход войны, что привело к окончательной победе над нацистской Германией. Около двух миллионов жизней было потеряно под Сталинградом. Вашему вниманию предлагаютя отредактированные клипы из видеоинтервью трех ветеранов Красной Армии, участвовавших в боевых действиях фронта.

The weekend before International Holocaust Remembrance Day, experts from Yad Vashem, the Department for Education and Culture of the Jewish Museum in Prague, the Terezin Memorial, and USC Shoah Foundation - The Institute for Visual History and Education held training seminars for teachers in the Czech Republic. The Institute presented its Czech-language educational resources, which are based on the testimony of Holocaust survivors and other witnesses; the seminars reached teachers in the cities of Karlovy Vary, Ostrov nad Ohří and Plzeň.

Jelentkezés a magyarországi program második évfolyamára az online jelentkezési lap kitöltésével MOST!

April 19, 2013April 19, 2013 is the day of the 70th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Commemorative events held in Warsaw will honor the memory of the Warsaw Ghetto Heroes.

In the summer of 2012, after a four-year, multimillion-dollar effort to preserve digitally the video interviews in its Visual History Archive, the USC Shoah Foundation discovered that 4,755 testimonies had technical or mechanical issues, such as video dropout or flickering, or audio problems.

USC Shoah Foundation - The Institute for Visual History and Education is pleased to announce its Fellows for 2013/2014 academic year.

Tenth grade students at Windward School in Mar Vista, California have been piloting a new IWitness activity titled What Can One Voice Tell Us About a Genocide as part of their Global Studies class.

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.