On Indigenous Peoples' Day, three members of the organizing committee will discuss 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.”

While she grew up Catholic, Ceci Chan became dedicated to the Jewish concept of tikkun olam, or “repairing the world” over 20 years ago. The concept also manifests itself in the Chinese phrase that translates to “one united world,” 世界大同, which was a concept representing the highest level of the ideal social system, an equal, classless, borderless and stateless world. The concept comes from Confucius recorded in the "Book of Rites • Li Yun".

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)