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.
The Jewish Museum in Prague has teamed with USC Shoah Foundation to provide a new testimony-based lesson plan for teachers in the Czech Republic. The lesson, “International Committee of the Red Cross and Terezín,” is about the Terezín ghetto and its use as a source of Nazi propaganda in a 1944 International Red Cross report. Read More
USC Shoah Foundation gave a presentation today about the use of survivor testimony and its educational website IWitness at California State University, Long Beach. The presentation was part of CSU Long Beach’s weeklong Eva and Eugene Schlesinger Teacher Training Endowed Workshop on the Holocaust. The workshop provides Holocaust curriculum development training for high school teachers. Read More
USC Shoah Foundation recently convened its second Teaching with Testimony for the 21st Century seminar in the Czech Republic. Held July 8-12 at the Malach Center for Visual History in Prague, the program attracted educators from throughout the country and also from neighboring Slovakia. Read More
Claudia Ramirez Wiedeman, PhD, has joined USC Shoah Foundation as Associate Director for Educational Technologies and Training. Her duties include strategic, content, and professional development related to the Institute’s flagship web-based educational tool, IWitness, which is designed to make the Visual History Archive accessible to educators and students around the world. Read More
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. Read More
Professor Andrea Pető of Central European University in Budapest has written an article about how to use USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive in teaching students at the graduate level. The piece appears as a chapter in the seventh volume of Jewish Studies at the Central European University edited by András Kovács and Michael Laurence Miller. Read More
