Hearing Holocaust survivors tell their stories in person is a powerful experience — and one that Next Generation Council member Louis Smith worried would soon be lost forever. So when he learned about New Dimensions in Testimony, a project of USC Shoah Foundation — The Institute for Visual History and Education, he wanted to give to help realize its potential.

Masako Togo Kasloff and her late husband Philip were drawn to the USC Shoah Foundation Institute after hearing the testimony of Dario Gabbai, who was forced to work as a Sonderkommando at Auschwitz during the Holocaust.

Pears Foundation, based in London, England, is generously supporting News Dimensions in Testimony. Developed in collaboration with the USC Institute for Creative Technologies and Conscience Display, and supported by a consortium of committed donors, New Dimensions in Testimony (NDT) is a pioneer technology that allows visitors to engage in dialogue with photo-real projected images of Holocaust survivors.

Susan Crown understands the importance of inspiring future generations to achieve unimaginable goals. Her industrialist and philanthropist grandfather, Henry Crown, who founded Material Service, which merged with General Dynamics in 1959, inspired his son, Lester, who in turn, inspired Susan.

Although they did not meet until years later in New York, both Ulrika Citron and her husband, Joel, were born in Sweden, the children of survivors of the Holocaust. “His story is very different from mine,” she says. “We’re all unique stories.”

Wendy Smith Meyer first learned about the USC Shoah Foundation in 1996, when her parents, Alfred and Selma Benjamin, gave their testimony. She attended part of the interview, when her parents, who grew up in Nazi Germany, gave their first-person accounts of increasing Jewish persecution. Her uncles, Owen and Edgar Hirsch, and aunt Elise Le Hu also gave testimony.

Edward Mosberg was born in Krakow and survived the Krakow ghetto, Plaszow and Mathausen concentration camps, and slave labor at the Hermann-Goering factory. His entire family was murdered in the Holocaust. He endured further tribulations before sharing his testimony with USC Shoah Foundation. A nearly fatal auto accident prevented him from his first scheduled interview, while a stroke forced him to postpone the second.

Dimensions in Testimony: Interactive Biography in Spanish Aliza Liberman’s upbringing in Panama is inextricably tied to the Holocaust: it’s where her Polish-Jewish grandfather, a survivor, immigrated to after World War II. This deep connection to the Holocaust is the main reason Liberman chose to support the Institute’s Dimensions in Testimony (DiT) program, which enables people to engage with a prerecorded video image of a genocide survivor by asking him or her questions and hearing the survivor’s answers in real time.

I never intended to spend months listening to Holocaust testimonies.  My name is Chaya Nove, I am a sociolinguist working on a doctoral dissertation about language change in Yiddish vowels. In my research, I consider the Yiddish spoken by Hasidic Jews in New York today (Hasidic Yiddish, or HY) as a living, changing language, with the understanding that this language was once spoken by a group of people in another time and place. 

Chaya Nove is a PhD candidate in the Linguistics program at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY). Her research interests include sociolinguistics, phonetics, language variation and change, contact linguistics and bilingualism. She is currently working on a project to investigate variation and change in the vowel system of contemporary Hasidic Yiddish spoken in New York. She is also conducting acoustic analyses of European Yiddish using archival recordings. Visit her CUNY website profile here. 

Worried about conjuring bad memories, Ilse Delman was initially reluctant to share her story with USC Shoah Foundation — The Institute for Visual History and Education. But after meeting with Institute staff, encouraged by her friend Anita Mayer, who had contributed her own testimony, and supported by her husband, Abner Delman, M.D., she shared her memories. A decade later, she remains grateful that her story will live on through the archive.

7 December 2020 - 7PM EST/4PM PST/11AM AEDT+1 This program is sponsored by the Goldrich Family Foundation. Join USC Shoah Foundation and the Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival for a special screening of The Tattooed Torah followed by a post-screening Q&A moderated by USC Shoah Foundation Finci-Viterbi Executive Director, Stephen Smith.

Join Stephen Smith as he gives the virtual keynote address at the first annual International Human Rights Day event hosted by ENOUGH (Education Now on Understanding Genocide and Hate) and The Town of New Castle Holocaust and Human Rights Committee. Stephen will share how testimony of Holocaust survivors and other genocide witnesses can help students, scholars, families, and communities make a difference in shaping our world for the better.

Leaders in the field of genocide prevention and human rights activists join together to discuss the definition of ethnic cleansing, in the context of the ongoing conflict in and around Artsakh. This prerecorded panel will air on Facebook Live.

A Holocaust survivor saved by Oskar Schindler who gave testimony to the Visual History Archive, the late Hazzan Moshe Taube z''l went on to become one of the great cantors of his generation. During this retrospective event, hosted by Hazzan Robert Kieval and produced by the Cantors Assembly, we will hear classic recordings and recollections of colleagues and friends.

The Last Goodbye virtual reality experience is now available on Oculus Rift. Four years ago, Pinchas Gutter traveled back to the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland, where he had been imprisoned as a child during the Holocaust. In this emotional journey, Pinchas shares his firsthand testimony of what he saw and experienced there and invites you into the spaces and memories with him.

A special event commemorating Human Rights Day: December 7, 2020 Presented by HGHS ENOUGH & Town of New Castle Holocaust & Human Rights Committee and featuring a keynote address from USC Shoah Foundation Executive Director Dr. Stephen Smith.

We are very saddened at the USC Shoah Foundation to learn that our friend and Holocaust survivor Cantor Moshe Taube has passed away at age 93. Cantor Taube was among 1,200 Jews saved by Oskar Schindler during the Holocaust and led in the chanting of prayers at Congregation Beth Shalom in Pittsburgh.

USC Shoah Foundation today mourns the loss of a close friend, George Weiss, a longtime volunteer with the Institute and a Holocaust survivor who endured homelessness and life on the run as a young child separated from his parents in both France and Belgium during the war. He was 87. Weiss was a familiar and beloved presence at the offices of the Institute, stopping in every week to curate and work with clips of video testimony from the Visual History Archive, which contains 55,000 life stories of survivors and witnesses to the Holocaust and other genocides.

The Institute mourns the passing of members of our community in 2020, including survivors who have given testimony Hanna Pankowsky, Dario Gabbai, Anneliese Nossbaum, Éva Székely, Itka Zygmuntowicz,

As we wrap up a very challenging year for many across the globe, we want to share highlights of just some of the work our Institute team and our partners have accomplished during the ongoing pandemic. Thank you for your support.

In recognition of their service as witnesses to the Holocaust, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier honored survivors Anita Lasker-Wallfisch and Henrietta Kretz with the highest civilian honor, the Order of Merit. Due to the pandemic, the president was unable to confer the medals personally but sent handwritten notes acknowledging their dedication to keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive and providing a strong voice against current antisemitism, right extremism and racism.

In this program, Stephen D. Smith, the Finci Viterbi Executive Director of USC Shoah Foundation, and Mary Pat Higgins, President, and CEO of the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum, will discuss the cutting-edge new technologies in storytelling and virtual reality and how they are being implemented in the museum space.

In this clip from the Visual History Archive, Elise Taft describes a moment of hope and joy in her family’s darkest times. It’s with those sentiments that we wish all of our Armenian friends and colleagues a Merry Christmas. May the holiday be as bright as the stars described by Elise in her poignant testimony.

As we watched the violence unfold at the US Capitol, accompanied by documented displays of white supremacy, antisemitic tropes and other forms of hate, we are reminded of the words of United States Congressman Tom Lantos, the only Holocaust survivor to have served in congress. In this clip, Rep. Lantos describes his motivation to serve his country...and the emotions he felt each morning as he approached the Capitol Building.

Now, many (many) months into this fight against Covid-19, it feels like we are rewriting our own story. It is like our obsession with separation has been viewed in a new lens, a wider one. The stories we are now drawn to are those of connections, even if experienced by individuals who are thousands of miles apart. And, once again, when digging into the Visual History Archive for stories of the past that exemplify this idea, there is no shortage of testimonies to lean on. One story in particular involves a reunion between Betty Grebenschikoff and Ana María Wahrenberg.

As a violent mob invaded the United States Capitol in an attempt to derail the electoral process, documented instances of antisemitism, anti-black racism, and other forms of hatred emerged.