“This effort is especially important now when the world is experiencing a rise of violent antisemitism,” says Ilia Salita, CEO of Genesis Philanthropy Group. “We believe that Dimensions in Testimony will help counteract this and, more broadly, to disseminate knowledge about the tragedy of Soviet Jewry during the Shoah and the heroism of Jews who fought against the Nazis.”

“I remember President Bill Clinton speaking at our 10th anniversary gala about his regret that the Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda happened on his watch,” Liberman said. “A genocide was in the making, and I did not want this to be on our watch. The Institute immediately sent a team to record the survivors' testimonies to ensure the world heard directly from the Rohingya before it was too late.”

Barry Sternlicht’s father Maurycy was only nine years old when he fled Poland in 1938. Maurycy survived the war by hiding with Czech partisans. He related his story in the testimony he gave to USC Shoah Foundation in 1998. Sternlicht never heard his father’s story until later in life. But his father’s resilience in the face of war, his success but later the displacement he faced with business setbacks in America, inspired Sternlicht to achieve his own success as a founder of the Starwood Capital Group.

Suzi Weiss-Fischmann’s commitment to testimony-based education comes from her roots. The co-founder of OPI Products, Weiss-Fischmann was born in Hungary, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor who endured the horrors of Auschwitz. Her mother’s experiences and her own early life in Hungary reinforced the importance of education as a way of countering hatred. It’s a major reason why she has supported the Institute for more than a decade, and why she recently joined the Institute’s Board of Councilors.

USC Shoah Foundation has partnered with JewishGen.org, an affiliate of the Museum of Jewish Heritage - A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, to integrate an index of data from nearly 50,000 Jewish Holocaust survivor testimonies found in the Visual History Archive® into the JewishGen Holocaust database.  

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)

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.

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. 

This one-hour documentary explores the journeys of Liberators and Liberation Witnesses drawing parallels between the past and present. These one-of-a-kind stories of World War II heroes serve as a compelling reminder of what is at stake as antisemitism and xenophobia are on the rise again, and as a call to action to stand against hatred in all its forms.