Ilse and Abner Delman

Worried about conjuring bad memories, Ilse Delman was initially reluctant to share her story with USC Shoah Foundation — The Institute for Visual History and Education. But after meeting with Institute staff, encouraged by her friend Anita Mayer, who had contributed her own testimony, and supported by her husband, Abner Delman, M.D., she shared her memories. A decade later, she remains grateful that her story will live on through the archive.

Chaya Nove is a PhD candidate in the Linguistics program at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY). Her research interests include sociolinguistics, phonetics, language variation and change, contact linguistics and bilingualism. She is currently working on a project to investigate variation and change in the vowel system of contemporary Hasidic Yiddish spoken in New York. She is also conducting acoustic analyses of European Yiddish using archival recordings. Visit her CUNY website profile here. 

My Reluctant Encounter With the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive

By: Chaya Nove

I never intended to spend months listening to Holocaust testimonies. 

My name is Chaya Nove, I am a sociolinguist working on a doctoral dissertation about language change in Yiddish vowels. In my research, I consider the Yiddish spoken by Hasidic Jews in New York today (Hasidic Yiddish, or HY) as a living, changing language, with the understanding that this language was once spoken by a group of people in another time and place. 

Chaya Nove

Aliza Liberman

Aliza Liberman’s upbringing in Panama is inextricably tied to the Holocaust: it’s where her Polish-Jewish grandfather, a survivor, immigrated to after World War II.

Ed Mosberg

Edward Mosberg was born in Krakow and survived the Krakow ghetto, Plaszow and Mathausen concentration camps, and slave labor at the Hermann-Goering factory. His entire family was murdered in the Holocaust. He endured further tribulations before sharing his testimony with USC Shoah Foundation. A nearly fatal auto accident prevented him from his first scheduled interview, while a stroke forced him to postpone the second.

Wendy Smith Meyer

Wendy Smith Meyer first learned about the USC Shoah Foundation in 1996, when her parents, Alfred and Selma Benjamin, gave their testimony. She attended part of the interview, when her parents, who grew up in Nazi Germany, gave their first-person accounts of increasing Jewish persecution. Her uncles, Owen and Edgar Hirsch, and aunt Elise Le Hu also gave testimony.

Ulrika and Joel Citron

Although they did not meet until years later in New York, both Ulrika Citron and her husband, Joel, were born in Sweden, the children of survivors of the Holocaust. “His story is very different from mine,” she says. “We’re all unique stories.”

Susan Crown

Susan Crown understands the importance of inspiring future generations to achieve unimaginable goals. Her industrialist and philanthropist grandfather, Henry Crown, who founded Material Service, which merged with General Dynamics in 1959, inspired his son, Lester, who in turn, inspired Susan.

Pears Foundation

Pears Foundation, based in London, England, is generously supporting News Dimensions in Testimony. Developed in collaboration with the USC Institute for Creative Technologies and Conscience Display, and supported by a consortium of committed donors, New Dimensions in Testimony (NDT) is a pioneer technology that allows visitors to engage in dialogue with photo-real projected images of Holocaust survivors.

Masako Togo Kasloff

Masako Togo Kasloff and her late husband Philip were drawn to the USC Shoah Foundation Institute after hearing the testimony of Dario Gabbai, who was forced to work as a Sonderkommando at Auschwitz during the Holocaust.
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