Representatives from more than 30 Holocaust museums and centers in the United States and Canada came to Los Angeles this week for the 2013 Association of Holocaust Organizations (AHO) Winter Seminar, hosted for the first time by USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education.

Blake Humphrey is the Student Body President at West Virginia University and a member of USC Shoah Foundation’s Intercollegiate Diversity Congress. He will be participating in the upcoming Intercollegiate Diversity Congress Summit at USC Shoah Foundation in Los Angeles this October.

After being honored as one of this year’s “Best Websites for Teaching and Learning” by the American Association of School Librarians (AASL), the Institute’s IWitness website continues to receive major education endorsements.

USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education and the Anti-Defamation League held a workshop in November where nearly 50 Southern California teachers learned to use Echoes and Reflections, a multimedia curriculum on the Holocaust.

Holocaust survivor testimony has made possible a Czech-language resource for education that illuminates the wartime history of the Czech government-in-exile.

USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education received the Arpa Foundation Award of the 2012 Arpa International Film Festival. The Institute was recognized for "its outstanding achievement in Holocaust education and preservation of testimonies of survivors." Executive Director Stephen D. Smith accepted the award on behalf of the Institute at the December 2 gala awards banquet in Los Angeles.

The Institute and Yad Vashem are reaching out to teachers in Slovakia who have shown a commitment to Holocaust documentation and tolerance education. On November 18, Martin Šmok, the Institute’s Senior International Program Consultant, presented at a Yad Vashem seminar hosted by the Holocaust Documentation Center. Nineteen activist-teachers attended the seminar, where Šmok gave an overview of the Institute and its mission to make survivor testimony a compelling voice for education and action.

Teachers across Poland traveled to Hungary last week to attend a workshop organized by USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education (the Institute). The workshop, part of the Institute’s Teaching with Testimony for the 21^st Century program, took place at Central European University in Budapest from November 11 to November 16. During the workshop, the teachers learned how to use interviews with Holocaust survivors and witnesses for education.