When Rob Hadley joined 10 other teachers for the IWitness Teaching Fellowship in July, it was far from his first time creating testimony-based lessons and activities.

Professor and Holocaust scholar Kenneth Waltzer has no trouble coming up with topics to research in the Visual History Archive.There’s his current study of the rescue of the children and youths at Buchenwald, or his investigation of the brick mason school in Auschwitz. Or there’s the project he just started a few weeks ago researching how many of the boys liberated from Buchenwald went on to serve in the Palmuch underground army in Israel. No matter what, he says, “if you know the material and you can get into it, you can find all kinds of ways to research in the testimonies.”

Thursday’s event to celebrate the completion of indexing the Institute’s new collection from Jewish Family and Children’s Services (JFCS) of San Francisco was the culmination of not just a year and a half, but eight years of work on the collection for indexer Debbie Kahn.

Indexing USC Shoah Foundation’s new testimony collection from Jewish Family and Children’s Services (JFCS) of San Francisco was an ideal continuation of the work Nancy Saul has done for much of her career.Saul spent 10 years as the reference and information services librarian at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles and also ran the center’s “Ask a Survivor” outreach program, so she was no stranger to testimony when she began working on the JFCS collection at USC Shoah Foundation in January 2014.

Zach Albert’s journey to USC Shoah Foundation to work as an indexer on the Jewish Family and Children’s Services (JFCS) of San Francisco Holocaust testimony collection began when he was 12 years old and preparing for his bar mitzvah.Albert was volunteering at the Dallas Holocaust Museum and had become totally captivated by the survivors he met there – they were like his surrogate grandparents, he said. When it came time for him to decide on a community service project for his bar mitzvah, he noticed that the museum was lacking something important: a Torah scroll.

While her fellow indexers focused on mainly English-language testimonies in USC Shoah Foundation’s new collection from Jewish Family and Children’s Services (JFCS) of San Francisco, Svetlana Ushakova indexed testimonies of Holocaust survivors from her native Russia – who at times felt like her own friends.With a PhD in Russian History from Novosibirsk University, Ushakova joined the JFCS collection with expertise in pre-war Soviet history, though she had not worked very closely with oral history testimonies before.

By spending a year in Los Angeles as USC Shoah Foundation’s Austrian Holocaust Memorial Service intern, Florian Köppl is fulfilling a lifelong dream.Köppl is the 12th young man from Austria to work at USC Shoah Foundation as an alternative to his compulsory military service back home. The Austrian Holocaust Memorial Service, founded by Andreas Maislinger, places accepted applicants at Holocaust memorial institutions around the world, where they live and work for one year.

It wasn’t until she wrote her book A Guest at the Shooter’s Banquet, available now, that Rita Gabis learned the truth about her family’s complicated past.

One of the first steps in the UK’s National Holocaust Centre and Museum’s partnership with USC Shoah Foundation was for James Griffiths to participate in the IWitness Teaching Fellowship this summer.

Melinda Goldrich continued her family’s tradition of philanthropy by hosting a special event to introduce a new audience in Aspen, Colo., last night to the work of USC Shoah Foundation.

The memorial service for Yevnige Salibian, one of the last remaining survivors of the 1915 Armenian Genocide, was held today in Mission HIlls, Calif. Salibian died August 29, 2015, at 101 years old.A force of nature well into her hundreds, Salibian gave testimony about her childhood experiences to USC Shoah Foundation in 2014.