10:00 AM PDT/ 1:00 PM EDT/ 3:00 AM AEST (+1)  Join USC Shoah Foundation Finci-Viterbi Executive Director, Stephen Smith as he speaks about his experiences leading to the founding of the National Holocaust Centre and Museum in England. 

“Research With Testimonies: Featuring the Center's 2020 Lev Student Research Fellows” Lucy Sun (USC undergraduate student, History major) and Rachel Zaretsky (MFA candidate in Art, USC Roski School of Art and Design) 2020 Beth and Arthur Lev Student Research Fellows April 14, 2021

This week, more than 20,000 people will attend Liberation 75, a virtual, global gathering for Holocaust survivors, their descendants, scholars, educators, and the wider community. The online conference, taking place May 4 to 9, is cosponsored by more than 200 organizations, including USC Shoah Foundation.

USC Shoah Foundation recently launched the Visual History Archive at Harvard University, establishing a powerful bridge from coast to coast, including a vibrant and timely panel discussion examining hate and disinformation in public discourse and concrete pathways to address the problems we face.

Under an assumed identity, Joseph André Scheinmann ran a French Resistance network of 300 agents that funneled information to the British. After his arrest and internment, he continued his scheming to save the lives of 100s of fellow prisoners.

Phil Scheinman didn’t know he had close relatives who survived the Holocaust until he saw the testimony of André Scheinmann, a cousin he calls the “Jewish James Bond”. Phil created a movie that brought together 400 family members — many of them newly discovered — to learn how André ran a network of 300 agents for the French Resistance and, even after he was sent to concentration camp, helped save dozens of lives.

USC Shoah Foundation partner and celebrated pianist Mona Golabek is scheduled to bring her livestreamed theatrical performance and concert to students and educators in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut at two signature events later this month.

3:00 PM PDT/6:00PM EDT/8:00 AM AEST (+1)  Over the past year, budding bakers sought refuge and comfort in their kitchens, learning to bake bread. Loaves of sourdough and challah forged connections between families and cultures when we could not physically be together. These connections build on deep traditions in cultures around the world, often discussed in USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive of 55,000 testimonies of genocide survivors and witnesses.   

Hela Goldstein’s testimony given to the British Film and Photographic Unit on April 24, 1945 is believed to be the first-ever audio-visual testimony given by a Holocaust survivor. As a 22-year old victim, she spoke from Bergen-Belsen, the Nazi concentration camp where she was imprisoned upon liberation. Standing at the foot of a mass grave with her killers before her, Hela recounted what she experienced. By telling her story in the face of death, she became a foremother of testimony.

USC Shoah Foundation has added 132 testimonies to its Visual History Archive. These firsthand accounts of mass atrocities spanning more than 100 years are now available to researchers, educators, family members, and the public.

Join author Judy Batalion, in conversation with Nancy Spielberg, to learn more about Batalion's new book The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos.

The Academy Award®-winning feature documentary film shares the remarkable stories of five people ­– a grandmother, a teacher, a businessman, an artist, and a U.S. congressman – as they return from the United States to their hometowns and to the ghettos and concentration camps that once imprisoned them. The film is currently available on Netflix and Blu-ray.

This Zoom mini-conference will feature brief talks on women rescuers and resisters in daily life, in ghettos and forests, and in camps, including women professionals, partisans and women in other genocides.

A distinguished voice of history has been lost today in the passing of Auschwitz survivor Roman Kent, who captured the agony of the Holocaust and the power of love in his telling of a simple story about his childhood dog, Lala. Kent was 92.

With an opening message from Finci-Viterbi Executive Director Stephen Smith, musicologist Francesco Lotoro and actor and playwright Ali Viterbi discuss Jewish composers of World War II.

USC Shoah Foundation’s Next Generation Council invites you to revisit the Academy Award®-winning documentary film The Last Days in conjunction with the 2021 remaster and debut on Blu-ray and Netflix.

In this excerpt from his interview for the Testimony on Location project, Holocaust survivor Ed Mosberg explains why it is important for him to record his testimony for future generations.

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.