A chance encounter leads to a surprising reunion


Move-in day for students at the University of Southern California this week led to a remarkable small-world moment between two strangers with ties to the Holocaust in the public-exhibit space of USC Shoah Foundation’s lobby.

Fifty-eight-year-old Alexander Moissis of the San Francisco Bay Area and his wife were helping their freshman son move into a dormitory when Alexander decided to steal away for a few minutes to visit USC Shoah Foundation, which is located on campus next to the dorm.

Rob Kuznia

Melbourne’s Lee Liberman has been inaugurated as the new chair of the Board of Councillors to the USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education, making her the foundation’s first chair to be based outside the United States. 

USC Shoah Foundation expands its collection of Guatemalan Genocide testimonies


Their loved ones – including women and children – were slaughtered by the military and tossed into mass graves.

For more than 30 years, survivors of the Guatemalan Genocide against the indigenous population assumed nobody cared about their stories.

After all, nobody had ever bothered to ask.

Rob Kuznia

USC Shoah Foundation redoubles efforts to collect testimonies of Holocaust survivors before it is too late


Miriam Katin survived the Holocaust as a toddler because her quick-thinking mother faked their deaths in Budapest at a historically perilous time for Jews in Hungary. Now 77, Katin has a thriving career as a graphic artist whose humor cartoons have appeared in The New Yorker.

Her remarkable oral history would have been lost to time without the initiative by USC Shoah Foundation to document the stories of Holocaust survivors before it is too late.

Rob Kuznia