One year after synagogue shooting, the Institute trains Pittsburgh teachers on using testimony to prompt difficult conversations

Wed, 10/30/2019

Leading up to the one-year anniversary of the deadly synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh, USC Shoah Foundation staff members trained educators in that metro area last week about how to use video testimonies of Holocaust witnesses as a tool to teach empathy, understanding and respect.

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The Laskers of Breslau – A Family History in Words and Music

Tuesday, July 8, 2025 - 11:58 PM PDT

On the occasion of the commemoration of Kristallnacht, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, Holocaust survivor and gifted cellist, along with her children Raphael and Maya, grandson Abraham and niece Michal, will offer an intimate glimpse inside their family history. Letters from the family archive, photographs and musical pieces tell the story of her love-filled childhood home in Breslau, the Nazis seizure of power and the subsequent fate of her family.

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This upper-level undergraduate seminar focused on the field of Native American/Indigenous studies as both a body of critical theory and a form of cultural critique.

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Anti-Rohingya Mass Violence

In August of 2017, the military and local collaborators in the Buddhist-majority Myanmar began violently driving Rohingya Muslims from their homes – destroying and looting villages; killing men, women and children; and raping women. The campaign killed at least 6,700 Rohingya and drove as many as 650,000 into refugee camps in neighboring Bangladesh. In November of 2017, a crew from USC Shoah Foundation spent time in the camps interviewing refugees.

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Nanjing Massacre

In December of 1937, during the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Japanese military invaded Nanjing, China, and engaged in a campaign of mass killing. Some of the witnesses live on in our Nanjing collection.

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Guatemalan Genocide

The Fundación de Antropología Forense de Guatemala (FAFG) has collected more than 500 video interviews from Guatemalan survivors and witnesses in Guatemala. All conducted in Spanish or K’iche’, the testimonies are being preserved and indexed by USC Shoah Foundation, which began adding them to the Visual History Archive in 2016. Currently there are 32 testimonies searchable in the Visual History Archive. FAFG continues to collect and grow the Guatemalan testimonies and collection.

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Armenian Genocide

The Armenian Genocide testimony collections include several categories of individuals linked directly or indirectly to the calamity. The vast majority are Armenian Genocide survivors, while others are Armenian descendants (second and third generation), scholars, rescuers and aid providers, foreign witnesses, and Yezidi survivors, as well as Arab and Greek eyewitnesses. The interviews were recorded in 10 languages in 13 countries.

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Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda

In 2013, the Visual History Archive expanded beyond the Holocaust for the first time, taking in 154 audiovisual testimonies of survivors and witnesses of the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. That set of atrocities claimed as many as one million lives over the course of about 100 days in 1994 when government-backed militias of ethnic Hutus went on a mass killing spree targeting the country’s next largest ethnic group, the Tutsis.