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.
In this activity, students will examine the impact that personal stories can have in inspiring others to action. They will listen and reflect on genocide survivor testimonies, discuss the concept of leadership and form belief statements about how they can become leaders in their communities. Read More
USC Shoah Foundation launched the first in a series of educational activities developed in partnership with the Armenian General Benevolent Union (AGBU). The series incorporates testimony of Armenian Genocide survivors and their descendants with supplementary videos from AGBU WebTalks, and is available to students through the Institute’s award-winning educational website, IWitness. Read More
From Oct. 24-26 at the USC Shoah Foundation office in Los Angeles, education staff guided the attendees through methodologies of building testimony-based educational content in IWitness and discussed plans and expectations for each institution moving forward. Read More
Street will lead presentations and workshops throughout the week-long event, which this year is centered on the post-Holocaust period and the specific events, or “pivotal moments,” that have shaped our understanding of the Holocaust. Read More
The Ways to Inspire Respect Professional Development series launching today will engage with real-world issues that teachers face in classrooms, such as cultural conflict, lack of dialogue or inappropriate dialogue, and confusion around issues of identity that can quickly escalate in schools and distract from curricular goals. Read More
USC Shoah Foundation and USC Center for Excellence in Teaching welcome proposals from faculty who will integrate USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive (VHA) and IWitness into a Spring 2018 course. Read More
