In this April 21, 2021, lecture, Alan Rosen considers the special manner of witness found in Holocaust-era calendars composed in ghettos, in camps, and in hiding. The event was organized by USC Shoah Foundation and cosponsored by the USC Casden Institute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American Life.

Fifteen hours of interviews related to a group of World War II-era diplomats who defied official policies to save hundreds of thousands of people from the Holocaust are to be integrated into the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive.

USC Shoah Foundation and Mona Golabek had an end-of-school-year gift for Zoomed-out teachers: a 30-minute, all-inclusive concert/history lesson/social-emotional learning tutorial with messages about learning from history, rising from injustice and overcoming adversity.

On the day that Faye Schulman’s parents and siblings were killed, along with almost all the Jews of her Eastern Polish town of Lenin, Schulman (then Faigel Lazebnik) was pulled aside by a Nazi officer. The Nazi official had been to Schulman’s studio a few weeks previously. After invading the town in 1942, the Nazis had ordered the talented young photographer to take photographs—both to document their activities in the town and to provide their officers with vanity portraits. Schulman remembered the photo session with the Nazi who now pulled her aside.

Anna Heilman and a group of young women smuggled gunpowder to blow up an Auschwitz crematorium. Some of them were caught. Their story lives on in Anna’s testimony.

A sizzle reel in support of our virtual event Judy Batalion: The Jewish "Ghetto Girls" Who Fought the Nazis where Judy Batalion discusses her book The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos.

Vladka remembers the founding of the F.P.O. (United Partisan Organization).

Eva Heymann, Holocaust survivor and Catholic nun, describes her experience working with the gay community through her AIDS work and how that exposure enabled her to understand her own sexuality in a more complex way than what she was taught in the Catholic Church.

Dances of the Holocaust, the We Are THE TREE OF LIFE program that was originally scheduled for May 25, has officially been rescheduled for Wednesday, June 23 at 11:00 am PT.

The featured panelists will explore the origin and idea behind the day, how survivors are being cared for, and the importance of the survivors and their legacy for the Jewish People and the world.

President Joe Biden on Thursday signed legislation into law establishing June 19 as Juneteenth National Independence Day—a US federal holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. USC will host an online event on June 19 to commemorate Juneteenth and celebrate Black heritage through student tributes, artistic performances and various speakers.

The Institute congratulates Lesley Stahl and her 60 Minutes team for winning a 2021 Gracie Award for their segment “Talking to the Past,” which focused on Dimensions in Testimony and featured live as well as virtual interviews with Holocaust survivors, including Pinchas Gutter, Eva Kor, Aaron Elster and Max Eisen.

A magical family event that brings the Holocaust survivor Lisa Jura's story to life for a new generation of young readers. Join Lisa’s daughter, acclaimed concert pianist and author Mona Golabek, for a special storytelling film based on her new children’s book, Hold on to Your Music: The Inspiring True Story of the Children of Willesden Lane.

USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of Fritzie Fritzshall, president of the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center, whose story of survival and will to share it has inspired thousands of people. She was 91. Always hopeful and optimistic, Fritzie’s understanding of where hate and intolerance can lead if left unchecked has driven her her whole life to educate and empower everyone she meets. She will be dearly missed.

A group of 30 second-grade children in New York City took part in a Tour for Tolerance event earlier this month that featured a virtual read-along given by famed broadcaster and Holocaust survivor Dr. Ruth Westheimer. Delivered virtually to students at the Glenn Morris School (PS100) in Queens, New York, the program was a pilot initiative of Tour for Tolerance and USC Shoah Foundation.

Actor, director, filmmaker and advocate Yuval David has a weapon of choice he employs to attract audiences and disarm would-be haters: a positive embrace of his story and a persistent belief in humanity.

Paul Rukesha, who was 16 yeas old during the Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda, describes the day he was saved by soldiers of the Rwandan Patriotic Army.

Join an online webinar that will focus on the new partnership between USC Shoah Foundation and the Srebrenica Memorial Center involving the collecting and indexing of testimony from survivors of the 1995 Srebrenica Genocide.

Theogene Kayitakire, a sergeant in the Rwandan Patriotic Army, helped capture the strategic high ground of the Mount Rebero neighborhood in Kigali in April 1994, just days after the Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda had begun. With the location secure and reinforcements arriving, Theogene had a request for his command: Could he go to save his relatives nearby? When given permission, he disguised himself in a government army uniform and, with a few other soldiers, went to find his uncle. But his uncle refused to flee to safety without his neighbors.

Rukesha’s testimony, along with six other interviews from The 600 documentary, was recently integrated into USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, which now holds 135 indexed and searchable interviews connected to the Genocide Against the Tutsi Rwanda. The majority of these testimonies were collected by Aegis Trust and the Kigali Genocide Memorial, in partnership with USC Shoah Foundation. The seven new testimonies include the first accounts of Rwandan liberators to be added to the collection.

Art and the Holocaust discusses the art of Holocaust survivor Dr. Viktor E. Frankl (author of Man’s Search For Meaning). This panel features Dr. Frankl’s grandson, Alexander Vesely-Frankl, a producer and award-winning documentary film director at Noetic Films in Los Angeles, California. He is also a licensed psychotherapist and head of the Viktor Frankl Media Archives in Vienna. Moderated by Stephen D. Smith, director of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute.

“How the Holocaust’s Jewish Calendars Bear Witness” Alan Rosen (Recipient of the 2020 Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research) April 21, 2021

Graduates of the Teaching with Testimony in the 21st Century professional development program came together last month to celebrate the program's 10th anniversary in Hungary. The event took place June 28-30th to commemorate the program's success and chart new opportunities for its graduates.

Carson Sizemore is already bracing for the tough conversations she will have in her 10th grade government class at her private high school in Albany, a small city on the banks of the Flint River in southwest Georgia. “I kind of have conflicting ideas with a lot of people in my family and my school. They’re more conservative, and I’m more in the middle somewhere,” Carson said. “I know there will be some debates in my government class.”

USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of Ruth Pearl, mother of slain Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl and co-founder and CFO of The Daniel Pearl Foundation, which promotes cross-cultural understanding through journalism and music.

Suzy Ressler, a survivor of Auschwitz who parlayed her family’s old-world recipes into the Philadelphia-based Mrs. Ressler’s Food Products, died July 3, 2021, at the age of 93. She was remembered for her business savvy, her warmth and generosity, and her impeccable elegance.