USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education has added a collection of testimonies of survivors and rescuers from the 1994 Rwandan Tutsi genocide to its Visual History Archive. This marks the first integration of testimonies outside of Holocaust survivors and witnesses into the Visual History Archive.

Over 70 new testimonies have been added to IWitness to increase the scope of experiences students can engage with. IWitness now features 1,321 video testimonies from the Visual History Archive that allows teachers and their students to search, watch, and learn directly from the eyewitness to history. IWitness activities allow students to construct multimedia projects that integrate testimony clips together with footage from other sources, as well as photographs and maps, voiceover audio, music and text.

Dr. Dan Leshem and Dr. Amy Carnes of USC Shoah Foundation will be leading a course to Rwanda this summer that will allow USC students to study post-genocide reconstruction.  The course, Rebuilding Rwanda: Memory, Testimony, and Living Together after Genocide, was developed in conjunction with Dr.

The students came to the Institute to search for and extract 10 video clips to use for a project in IWitness, the Institute’s award-winning educational website. Explore IWitness

The USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education is now accepting applications for a summer course that will allow USC students to study post-genocide conflict resolution in Rwanda. "Rebuilding Rwanda:  Memory, Testimony, and Living Together after Genocide" (IR-318, Conflict Resolution and Peace Research) will provide a practicum for students to consider the complex task that societies face in the aftermath of genocide.

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.

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.

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.

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.

By Nora Snyder

USC Shoah Foundation’s director of research and documentation, Karen Jungb

Ten Rwandan testimonies from USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive are the latest additions to IWitness, USC Shoah Foundation’s interactive educational website.

When I tell my fellow USC students that I’m the president of an organization called SFISA, it’s usually safe to assume that 90% of them have no idea what it is. It’s not the most elegant of acronyms and we acknowledge this. Our club’s full name – the Shoah Foundation Institute Student Association – is equally as unwieldy but at least it’s descriptive, and that’s something, right? But even if they’ve heard of our less than stellar name, they still might not know who we are or what we do. So let me take this moment to enlighten you.