Aniko Friedberg describes how she would create sculptures out of clay while interned in the Allendorf forced labor camp, a subcamp of Buchenwald. She didn’t recall this memory until she reunited with former prisoners, who remembered her sculptures, decades later.

USC Shoah Foundation’s academic year programming kicks off next Monday with a screening of the documentary As Seen Through These Eyes, which tells the stories of Holocaust survivors who made art during and after World War II.

With nearly 52,000 interviews from survivors of the Holocaust and other genocides, the archive of audio-visual testimony assembled and maintained by USC Shoah Foundation is so abundant it would take at least 12 years to watch it from beginning to end. And that’s assuming the footage would be rolling 24 hours a day, seven days a week. When I started my new job here at the Institute, I was struck by this statistic, which adequately conveys the scope of this incredible resource.

For the first time, USC Shoah Foundation has published a lesson that was created by a teacher in the Teaching with Testimony in the 21st Century professional development program.

USC Shoah Foundation’s educational resources can help educators observe National Bullying Prevention Month in October by teaching students about acceptance, resilience and other relevant topics.

William recalls the joyful celebration of Simchat Torah-the holiday marking the completion of weekly Torah readings- with Rabbi Teitelbaum, the Satmar Rebbe, holding a Sefer Torah (Torah scroll) - in the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp. The celebration took place even though the barrack was surrounded by German soldiers.

Please join USC Shoah Foundation as it co-hosts a lecture with the USC Gould School of Law International Human Rights Clinic.Professor David Crane, former Chief Prosecuter at the Special Court for Sierra Leone, will discuss the effort he has led to seek justice for the hundredsof thousands killed and millions displaced since 2011 in Syria’s ongoing civil war. Crane will detail his tireless advocacy before the UN Security Council, General Assembly, and the US Congress in hopes of establishing a Syrian Extraordinary Tribunal to Prosecute Atrocity Crimes.

Judy LaPietra was one of the first to learn about USC Shoah Foundation’s new educational website, IWitness, and from then on she has remained one of its most avid users.LaPietra teaches eighth grade history at St. Mark Catholic School in Huntersville, NC, and also created and teaches three courses in the global studies department at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte: “The Legacy of the Holocaust,” “Bearing Witness to the Past:  A Journey to Auschwitz” and “Representations of the Holocaust.” She has even taken her college students on trips to Poland to visit Auschwitz.

Eva Kor and her twin sister Miriam were experimented on by infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. She describes how one experimented had nearly killed her but she promised herself she would survive. Eva’s testimony is featured in the IWitness activity Growing Up Behind the Barbed Wire.

The new activity Growing Up Behind the Barbed Wire at Auschwitz is part of IWitness’s Auschwitz: The Past is Present content to commemorate the upcoming 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

I adored my father and admired him greatly. Harold Eisenberg was a good man in every sense of the word. He spoke about his life in Opatow, Poland before World War II and even his experience during the Holocaust, but he also lived very much in the present, working hard to provide for his family.  The business he started after the war became the foundation for much of our extended family’s success. I was named for his mother and his sister, who both perished in the Holocaust, and my father would often look at me tenderly and tell me how much I reminded him of his mother. 

Kaja Finkler speaks admirably of her mother, a student of modern thought despite her orthodox Jewish background. Kaja recalls how her mother studied law in pre-war Poland with Raphael Lemkin, who later coined the term genocide.

Lemkin is the subject of a new documentary called "Watchers of the Sky," now playing in select theaters. It is inspired by U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power’s Pulitzer-Prize winning book A Problem from Hell.

Elena Nightingale speaks how life changed for her family in the late 1930’s when anti-Jewish laws were enforced in Italy. She describes how her father was forced out of his job and she felt like a second class citizen.

While re-watching Schindler’s List before applying to present at USC Shoah Foundation’s upcoming international conference “Memory, Media and Technology: Exploring the Trajectories of Schindler’s List,” Peg LeVine was struck by the numerous examples of “ritual annihilation” perpetrated against the Jews in the film, such as the ransacking of synagogues and homes and the destroying of religious objects.

Senior scholars in Holocaust and genocide studies are invited to apply for the 2015-2016 Center Research Fellowship. The deadline is Dec. 1, 2014.

The latest evaluation of IWitness in Rwanda shows that students’ interest in civic engagement and making a difference after using IWitness has increased significantly since Phase 1 of the program.

Ildephonse Gasana reflects on life after genocide including learning how to forgive and to be more tolerant of one another. Gasana’s testimony is featured in the IWitness activity, The Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda.

USC Shoah Foundation, Aegis Trust Rwanda and the Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (NIOD) conducted a feasibility study this month to determine how case files from trials of genocide perpetrators could be digitized and preserved.

Theoneste Karenzi recalls the Gacaca courts and the perpetrators he testified against.

This video reel from the IWitness activity Art in the Face of Death is a collection of artworks, including poetry, song, drawings, paintings and sculpture created by survivors in response to the Auschwitz-Birkenau experience. Some of the art pieces throughout this video are courtesy of Yad Vahsem and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 

Summary:Free and open to the public, monthly Institute visits give guests a chance to explore the life stories of survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides and to discover how their memories are being used to overcome prejudice, intolerance and bigotry.Description:

The students in Leslie Schaffer’s Holocaust studies elective last semester didn’t visit a Holocaust museum – with the help of IWitness, they created their own.Schaffer, a guidance counselor at Abbeville High School in Greenville, SC, who also teaches an interdisciplinary Holocaust elective course, said because the school isn’t located close enough to a Holocaust museum for the students to visit, her class came up with the idea to make their own museum at their school. She discovered IWitness while brainstorming for the project and thought immediately that it would be “perfect.”

The public Institute visit for December 10, 2014 is canceled. The next scheduled monthly public visit will be on February 11, 2015 from 11am – 1pm, click here to RSVP.

Buchenwald liberator David Pollock describes why he decided to work at the United Nations after he was discharged from the Canadian military. Pollock worked for the United Nations for nearly thirty years.  

The "Auschwitz – Art in the Face of Death" Mini Quest asks students to consider artwork produced as a response to the experience of Auschwitz-Birkenau and to produce their own artistic responses to what they learned.

Pinchas Gutter stepped onto the bimah at the Kiever Synagogue in Toronto, Canada, where for the 27th consecutive time he was about to lead the Yom Kippur services.  He stood tall in his white robe breathing deeply surrounded by eight white-clad Torah scrolls, each held by a leaders of the congregation.  The scrolls appear to jostle for position, their silver shields and finials glistening as PInchas intones the ancient supplication, 'Kol Nidrei'.  But on the bimah there are more than the eight men holding Torah scrolls, because gathered around him are also the ghosts of the Gerrer Hasidim o

USC Shoah Foundation and its partner in the Czech Republic, PANT, have been busy leading workshops and seminars about the Visual History Archive and IWitness for educators.