Director Steven Spielberg founded Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation in 1994 to videotape and preserve interviews with Holocaust survivors.
By 2001, we had collected 52,000 testimonies. Our Visual History Archive now contains almost 57,000 searchable testimonies, the largest such collection in the world.
We started digitizing our collection in 2008 and we constantly update our preservation systems. We hold 12 patents on digital collection management technologies that we developed.
In 2023, users viewed 223 million minutes of testimony across all our platforms, including our Visual History Archive, YouTube channel, website, and IWitness educational platform.
In January 2006, the Shoah Foundation moved from Universal Studios to the USC campus in Los Angeles, joining the vibrant and engaged community of faculty, researchers, and students. In 2023, we opened offices at USC’s Washington, D.C., campus.
Expanding Research Horizons
Researchers, students, journalists, policymakers, storytellers, and the public turn to our Visual History Archive to enrich and expand their understanding of history. With its wealth of testimonies, tools, and resources, the archive is vital for deepening knowledge and fostering meaningful insights.
A walk through our history, from VHS tapes in the backlots of Universal Studios to our state-the-art technology center and elegant headquarters at USC.
USC Shoah Foundation has published two Polish-language lessons about the Holocaust, complete with clips from the Visual History Archive, on the USC Shoah Foundation website. They are available for free to educators around the world. Read More
On the heels of USC Shoah Foundation’s new partnership with the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall to collect and preserve testimony of Nanjing Massacre survivors, the educational platform Facing History and Ourselves signed an agreement to integrate three of those testimonies into its own educational materials.
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Czech educators are gathering at the Academy of Sciences in Prague today to attend a conference dedicated to the "Ours or Foreign? Jews in the Czech 20th Century" project from the Jewish Museum of Prague.
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The Haverford School and Main Line Reform Temple – Beth Elohim will host workshops for teachers and students to learn about IWitness, USC Shoah Foundation’s educational website that uses testimony to teach via engaging multimedia-learning activities.
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The new Museum of the History of the Polish Jews in Warsaw is now offering educational programming for students that uses the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive.
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