For Board of Councilors Chair Emeritus Robert J. Katz, involvement with USC Shoah Foundation stems not from a direct personal connection, but from an emotional pull he later identified.


The grandchild of a Holocaust survivor, Aliza Liberman wonders whether her children will feel as connected to its horrors and lessons as she does. As a member of USC Shoah Foundation’s Next Generation Council, Liberman is doing what she can to ensure future generations feel that bond by supporting the Institute’s mission. From a young age, the Holocaust was part of her life. “The
fact that my grandfather never talked much about his life and his family in Poland always moved me to know more,” Liberman says.

Each week, we will profile a scholar who will present his or her research at the Center for Advanced Genocide Research's upcoming conference Digital Approaches to Genocide Studies, Oct. 23-24, 2017.

Each week, we will profile a scholar who will present his or her research at the Center for Advanced Genocide Research's upcoming conference Digital Approaches to Genocide Studies, Oct. 23-24, 2017.

USC Shoah Foundation mourns the death of Georg Citrom, Holocaust survivor and longtime friend of the Institute. Citrom was born in Oradea, Romania, in 1931. His father was a teacher in the local Jewish school and he had one older sister, Suzy. His family practiced modern Orthodox Judaism and he loved visiting his grandparents at their house in the countryside.

Each week, we will profile a scholar who will present his or her research at the Center for Advanced Genocide Research's upcoming conference Digital Approaches to Genocide Studies, Oct. 23-24, 2017.

We are sad to learn of the passing of Kurt Messerschmidt, Holocaust survivor, educator and beloved cantor. He was 102. Messerschmidt was born Jan. 2, 1915 in Weneuchen, Germany, but moved to Berlin in 1918 and excelled as a linguistics scholar, gymnast and musician. He was well-respected and a leader among his classmates and teachers, but was unable to attend college because of anti-Jewish measures implemented by the Nazis.

Maria Zalewska grew up in what acclaimed writer and journalist Martin Pollack calls the “contaminated landscapes” of Eastern Europe, where most of the Nazi concentration camps and extermination camps were built. Her physical proximity to spaces of the Shoah, as well as her familial relationships to victims of Auschwitz-Birkenau, drew her initially toward the study of the different ways in which Eastern Europeans filled, organized and produced spaces of memory.

It’s well-documented that family units were disrupted and displaced during the Holocaust – but just how affected were they, and were they able to reconvene following the war?

A thousand frayed puzzle pieces sit on a long table ahead of you, split by color into several quadrants but otherwise unconnected. Many are bent or folded, and still others remain at the outskirts of the table with colors that don’t match at all with the rest, you can’t even fathom where they fit in. And you’ve seen the general picture they’re all meant to finally arrange into but there’s a distinct chance you’re misremembering most of its fragments, that the big picture is gone to you.

Sasha Yemelianova has learned about the Babi Yar massacre in school before, but going on USC Shoah Foundation’s IWalk and leading it for other students has given her a new perspective of the massacre and its memorialization. German and SS police units murdered nearly the entire Jewish population of Kiev – 33,771 men, women and children – at the Babi Yar ravine outside the city on September 29 and 30, 1941. About 75,000 more Jews as well as communists, Roma, and Soviet prisoners of war were also murdered there over the next few months.

D’Angelo King ran for Indiana University’s student association on a platform of improving the school’s diversity and inclusion. Next week, he will join 19 other student leaders from across the country at USC Shoah Foundation’s first-ever Intercollegiate Diversity Congress to develop strategies to make his vision a reality.

Ohio State University Student Body President Andrew Jackson and his counterparts across the Big 10 Conference will join student leaders from universities around the country at USC Shoah Foundation next week to think critically about diversity and inclusion on their campuses.

Now well into his second year as student body president of Michigan State University, Lorenzo Santavicca understands the realities of his school, one that has made headlines both for its athletics but also for its numerous reports of sexual misconduct. This year, he’ll be well-equipped to deal with some of these realities, stocked with resources from a new initiative by USC Shoah Foundation.

The idea of building inclusive connected communities through the testimonies of genocide survivors may be a novel one, but DePauw University Student Body Vice President Armaan Patel is eager to learn more about it at the USC Shoah Foundation Intercollegiate Diversity Congress (IDC) later this week.

  You may not think it, but deep in the heart of Illinois, a significant population of students could be affected by the rollback of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) protections. Chief of Staff of Illinois State University’s student government Idan Rafalovitz, however, thinks his team will soon be well-equipped to help such students and others with a new inclusion initiative launched by USC Shoah Foundation.

Following the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum was created by the Vietnamese-backed government in an attempt to garner international legitimacy for the new regime. The museum, according to research fellow Timothy Williams at the Centre for Conflict Studies at Marburg University in Germany, seeks to shock visitors and demonstrate the horrific nature of the previous regime.

For many survivors of the Holocaust, persecution began in the hometown, where greed may have swayed perceived friends and neighbors to unspeakable actions. The inhabitance of formerly Jewish-owned apartments by non-Jewish tenants in the early 1940s, specifically in Paris, provides a strong case study of this phenomenon and the basis of a research project developed by Eric Le Bourhis of the Institute for Political Sciences, Nanterre (France).

There are no certain guides for rebuilding a society in the aftermath of systematic violence and genocide against one of its populations and its culture. Nevertheless, some societies address their histories more effectively than others, as found by Anika Walke, a German expat working as an assistant professor of History at Washington University in St. Louis.

Twelve years after the last federally operated Indian Residential School closed in 1996, the government of Canada apologized to the system’s survivors. They’d been put through so much they hadn’t deserved, from forced removals from their families and communities to deprivations of food, their ancestral languages, adequate sanitation; from forced labor and adherence to the Christian faith to physical abuse.

Archaeology is like a protracted police investigation, wherein your evidence is precious because it is sparing and you’re lucky if you have a lot of witnesses. Caroline Sturdy Colls, an associate professor of Forensic Archaeology and Genocide Investigation at Staffordshire and founder of their Centre of Archaeology, knows this with certainty, having long worked in both the fields of genocide research and homicide investigation.

Event reconstruction can be an enormous undertaking – consider the millions spent by producers on costuming and sets for films and theatrical productions; the years of research and interviewing done by the authors of biographies and history books. Still, a new sort of reconstruction is on the rise now –virtual reality, for which users don goggles to view storyworlds developed by videographers, directors, programmers and sometimes researchers and historians.

Though USC Shoah Foundation runs in 13-year-old Sydney Gordon’s veins – her dad Mark Gordon is a member of its Next Generation Council and her grandmother Ita Gordon has been an indexer and researcher there since the foundation’s inception in 1994 – Sydney admitted she was hesitant to choose it as her bat mitzvah project at first.

Despite living in Kiev her entire life, Oksana Ishchenko (right in photo) had never been to the site of the Babi Yar massacre in Ukraine, on the same side of the Dnieper river. In fact, before she was invited to train to give a Babi Yar IWalk – an educational program that put on a walk around the ravine guided by testimony clips from the Visual History Archive – this year, Ishchenko hadn’t learned very much about Babi Yar.

Grand View University is a liberal arts college in Des Moines, Iowa, with a student body of about 2,000. At such a small school, said its student body president Kendall Antle, it’s true: everybody seems to know everybody. But the small-town feel does come with its disadvantages. “One major issue we face is apathy,” Antle said. “You have cliques. People have a tendency to stay with whom they know and work with whom they know.”

Just a couple weeks after attending USC Shoah Foundation’s Intercollegiate Diversity Congress (IDC) Summit, DePauw University Student Body President Erika Killion already has a plan for incorporating testimony clips and other USC Shoah Foundation educational resources into campus activities.

Fresh off of USC Shoah Foundation’s Intercollegiate Diversity Congress (IDC) Summit, Memphis University Student Body Vice President Kevyanna Rawls has some new expectations for her school. With testimony clips and other USC Shoah Foundation educational resources gleaned from the Summit, she’ll have plenty with which to make an impact.

Among the student leaders from across the country who attended USC Shoah Foundation’s inaugural Intercollegiate Diversity Congress (IDC) Summit in October were two representatives from USC itself. One was Kara Watkins-Chow, who came away from the summit with new ideas and insight to take back to her role as president of the Queer & Ally Student Association.

A month after USC Shoah Foundation’s Intercollegiate Diversity Congress (IDC) Summit, Georgia State University Student Government Executive Vice President Jesse Calixte is still buzzing with ideas on how to make his university, the fourth most diverse in the country, more inclusive for all its students. Armed with testimony clips and other USC Shoah Foundation educational tools he obtained during the Summit, Calixte will have plenty with which to make an impact. “Going to this summit was one of my best decisions so far as a student leader,” Calixte said.

After two years of cursory research and interest, Martin Gruber was able to start a full-time job as USC Shoah Foundation’s 2017 Austrian Holocaust Memorial Service intern this October, one entire year early. And he couldn’t be more pleased.