Above: One branch of the Scheinman family, which expanded considerably after cousin Zoe found and reached out to descendants of the ten children of Shmuel and Feige Scheinman, her husband’s great grandparents.
Last summer, Phil Scheinman spent five hours straight watching Joseph André Scheinmann’s testimony on USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive. He was both devastated and riveted.
USC Shoah Foundation partner and celebrated pianist Mona Golabek is scheduled to bring her livestreamed theatrical performance and concert to students and educators in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut at two signature events later this month.
Over the past year, budding bakers sought refuge and comfort in their kitchens, learning to bake bread. Loaves of sourdough and challah forged connections between families and cultures when we could not physically be together. These connections build on deep traditions in cultures around the world, often discussed in USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive of 55,000 testimonies of genocide survivors and witnesses.
Hela Goldstein’s testimony given to the British Film and Photographic Unit on April 24, 1945 is believed to be the first-ever audio-visual testimony given by a Holocaust survivor. As a 22-year old victim, she spoke from Bergen-Belsen, the Nazi concentration camp where she was imprisoned upon liberation. Standing at the foot of a mass grave with her killers before her, Hela recounted what she experienced. By telling her story in the face of death, she became a foremother of testimony.
Honoring the 70th anniversary of the Babi Yar tragedy, the Ukrainian Cinema Club in Berlin presented a screening of Spell Your Name, a documentary film by Sergey Bukovsky, co-produced by the USC Shoah Foundation Institute and the Victor Pinchuk Foundation. The screening was followed by a discussion with Cristoph Filinger, a journalist and a freelancer at the American Jewish Committee office in Berlin. Leonid Zozovskii, an Institute-interviewed survivor who lived through the Holocaust under false identity in Zelenchukskaia (Ordzhonikidze, Russia, then USSR), attended the screening.