In 1969, Professor Richard Hovanissian started requiring students in his UCLA seminar course to record and transcribe interviews with survivors of the Armenian Genocide. Over the course of the next 50 years, his students assembled a massive library of more than 1,000 interviews, a universe of experiences that is one of the largest collections of Armenian testimonies in the world. This year, Hovanissian donated the collection to the USC Shoah Foundation, joining the testimonies in his collection to the hundreds collected by Dr. Michael Hagopian of the Armenian Film Foundation.

At the age of 16, Cole Kawana traveled to Rwanda for an investigative journalism trip to learn more about the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi. While there, he made a short film, The Kindness of Strangers. The film outlines the massacre of nearly a million people over 100 days — almost a sixth of the nation’s population at the time — and also chronicled how he helped survivors by donating filters to ensure drinkable water. This led to his founding of the Clean Water Ambassadors Foundation, which donates water filters to communities in need.

Marilyn Sinclair will never forget the day her father gave his testimony to USC Shoah Foundation. “It was the first time we came together as a family to discuss my father being a Holocaust survivor,” she recalls. “When he passed away in 2010, I realized the days of having actual witnesses to provide live testimony were numbered.”

Naomi Azrieli understands the power of the written word that enables survivors’ memories to live on and be shared. As head of the Azrieli Foundation, she oversees both its philanthropy and the publication of survivors’ memoirs in illustrated volumes made free to the public.

As the grandchild of four Holocaust survivors, Shael Rosenbaum, feels a duty to keep history’s flame from dimming so that the lessons of the past can remain alive and vibrant for the future. In addition to chairing the Sarah and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre in Canada, he also served on USC Shoah Foundation’s Next Generation Council (NGC).

Tammy Anderson was first drawn to USC Shoah Foundation by her accounting firm partners Gerald Breslauer and Michael Rutman, who served on the Institute’s first board. Anderson’s involvement began with providing accounting services and blossomed into membership in the Next Generation Council (NGC).

Trudy Elbaum Gottesman keeps her family tree in her purse, close to her at all times, so she will always remember the names of relatives who were murdered in the Holocaust.

Board of Councilors member William P. Lauder has been part of USC Shoah Foundation from its very beginning, when founder Steven Spielberg asked him to support a collection of interviews with Holocaust survivors. “We met on the Amblin backlot, in a conference room with a whiteboard that had upcoming movie ideas on it,” Lauder recalls. Over the next two decades, those interviews grew into the Visual History Archive, and Lauder has steadfastly backed the Institute ever since.

A symposium with Professor Federico Finchelstein (New School For Social Research) and Dr. Susan Neiman (Einstein Forum, Potsdam)

The Holocaust separated brothers Joseph and Sol Gringlas from all they knew, as well as from one another. After years of surviving slave labor apart, the two were reunited, miraculously, when they were both at the Buna subcamp of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

USC Shoah Foundation is saddened to hear of the recent passing of Millie Zuckerman, Holocaust survivor and longtime friend of the Institute. Millie was surrounded by her family when she passed away on August 9, 2020 at the age of 94. She was born on September 25, 1925 in Humniska, Poland and was a hidden child of the Holocaust.

This summer, USC Shoah Foundation education team hosted their annual Leadership Workshop—Action and Values presented by the William P. Lauder Junior Internship Program. The workshop calls for applicants who are preparing themselves to be in leadership positions in their communities. The focus is to cultivate, through the power of testimony, the confidence and courage to be an upstander. Testimonies, with their powerful universal messages, instill in students the importance of personal stories, values, and agency.

Daryn Eller manages the Institute’s institutional media collection and participates in cataloging the Visual History Archive testimonies. She previously worked as a magazine and book writer, has an undergraduate degree from UC Berkeley, and a masters in library and information science from San Jose State University.

Stephanie Abadom joined the communications department at USC Shoah Foundation in March of 2020. She is currently a second-year graduate student at USC Annenberg’s School for Communications and Journalism where she is studying Strategic Public Relations. Stephanie is an Annenberg fellow and also works as the operations manager for the Annenberg Media Center. She will be graduating in Spring 2021.

In this September 2020 talk, Chad Gibbs discusses how Jewish prisoners created what he terms “spaces of resistance” at Treblinka and how studying these locations can provide revelations about the roles of women prisoners in resistance. 

An Unprecedented Partnership with Orlando Holocaust Museum for Hope & Humanity The Holocaust Memorial Resource & Education Center of Florida has partnered with USC Shoah Foundation to be a content and creative partner in the development of the new Holocaust museum to be located in downtown Orlando. This marks the first time USC Shoah Foundation has teamed with a Holocaust museum as they design, develop, and implement a ground-up and permanent museum-wide exhibition.

“Locating Women in the Revolt: Gender and Spaces of Resistance at Treblinka” Chad Gibbs (PhD Candidate in History, University of Wisconsin at Madison) 2020-2021 Breslauer, Rutman, and Anderson Research Fellow September 29, 2020

  Call for Applications from PhD Candidates   Greenberg Research Fellowship Katz Research Fellowship in Genocide Studies

Founded in 1994 by Steven Spielberg, and housed at USC since 2006, USC Shoah Foundation is the caretaker of the Visual History Archive: 55,000 testimonies of Holocaust and genocide survivors and witnesses that fuels programming around the world to educators, scholars, organizations, and community members. The Visual History Archive contains countless treasured family stories, including members of the Trojan family, and during Trojan Family Weekend, we invite you to experience our work in this virtual event.

Experience USC Shoah Foundation's world-renowned Dimensions in Testimony interactive biographies, recently featured on 60 Minutes. Join this event to learn about USC Shoah Foundation and ask questions to Holocaust survivors powered by AI and fueled through technological innovation.

In recent years, there has been a significant spike in antisemitism and hate-fueled violence and rhetoric against different groups on both a national and global scale. Surveys show that Holocaust education has an enormous positive impact on young people’s attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, and actions. Despite the decisive outcomes from an understanding of this important history, Holocaust education is a requirement in only 15 U.S. states. The need for Holocaust education could not be greater now. Join this panel of experts to learn about the ongoing efforts to increase Holocaust education across the country.

On October 21, 2020, at 9:00 AM EDT, join Echoes & Reflections Director Ariel Behrman as she discusses how her team responded to the needs and concerns of teachers faced with suddenly having to teach the history of the Holocaust in a virtual classroom as schools closed in the wake of COVID-19, by developing and extending their pedagogy, teaching strategies and tools to support teaching about the Holocaust in the context of COVID-19.

USC Shoah Foundation has been awarded the nation’s prestigious distinguished building award – The American Architecture Award® for 2020 – for its new global headquarters at the University of Southern California.

In this clip from her testimony, Itka Zygmuntowicz reads one of her poems to illustrate the danger of being a bystander.

We are very saddened at the USC Shoah Foundation to learn that our friend and Holocaust survivor Itka Zygmuntowicz passed away October 9, 2020, at the age of 94.

On Indigenous Peoples’ Day, October 12, 2020, three members of the organizing committee discussed goals and plans for the international conference “Mass Violence and Its Lasting Impact on Indigenous Peoples - The Case of the Americas and Australia/Pacific Region.” The conference, postponed until October 2021 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, will convene Indigenous and non-Indigenous knowledge holders and scholars from around the world at the University of Southern California, which sits on the traditional land of the Tongva/Gabrieliño People.

Thanks to an extraordinary gift from the Koret Foundation, USC Shoah Foundation is partnering with the Hold On to Your Music Foundation to develop an educational program centered around The Children of Willesden Lane, a novel and musical that highlight the story of Jewish children rescued from central Europe and sent unaccompanied to Great Britain by the Kindertransport at the start of World War II.

Alive through oil and acrylic, the eleven survivors of Auschwitz look forward resolutely, facing the world together, bound by their shared history. The survivors are subjects depicted in an 18-foot wide portrait that served as the centerpiece of artist David Kassan’s recent exhibition Facing Survival: David Kassan at USC Fisher Museum of Art.

Twenty-five years ago, the world watched as the small African country of Rwanda descended into genocidal violence. Over the course of just a few months, forces in the government, media, military and general population attacked members of the country’s Tutsi minority, killing more than 800,000 of them in an organized campaign of genocide. In the years since, as the country has rebuilt and invested in a process of investigation, justice and reconciliation, the voices of survivors have become central.