President Joe Biden on Thursday signed legislation into law establishing June 19 as Juneteenth National Independence Day—a US federal holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. USC will host an online event on June 19 to commemorate Juneteenth and celebrate Black heritage through student tributes, artistic performances and various speakers.

The Institute congratulates Lesley Stahl and her 60 Minutes team for winning a 2021 Gracie Award for their segment “Talking to the Past,” which focused on Dimensions in Testimony and featured live as well as virtual interviews with Holocaust survivors, including Pinchas Gutter, Eva Kor, Aaron Elster and Max Eisen.

A magical family event that brings the Holocaust survivor Lisa Jura's story to life for a new generation of young readers. Join Lisa’s daughter, acclaimed concert pianist and author Mona Golabek, for a special storytelling film based on her new children’s book, Hold on to Your Music: The Inspiring True Story of the Children of Willesden Lane.

USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of Fritzie Fritzshall, president of the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center, whose story of survival and will to share it has inspired thousands of people. She was 91. Always hopeful and optimistic, Fritzie’s understanding of where hate and intolerance can lead if left unchecked has driven her her whole life to educate and empower everyone she meets. She will be dearly missed.

A group of 30 second-grade children in New York City took part in a Tour for Tolerance event earlier this month that featured a virtual read-along given by famed broadcaster and Holocaust survivor Dr. Ruth Westheimer. Delivered virtually to students at the Glenn Morris School (PS100) in Queens, New York, the program was a pilot initiative of Tour for Tolerance and USC Shoah Foundation.

Actor, director, filmmaker and advocate Yuval David has a weapon of choice he employs to attract audiences and disarm would-be haters: a positive embrace of his story and a persistent belief in humanity.

Paul Rukesha, who was 16 yeas old during the Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda, describes the day he was saved by soldiers of the Rwandan Patriotic Army.

Join an online webinar that will focus on the new partnership between USC Shoah Foundation and the Srebrenica Memorial Center involving the collecting and indexing of testimony from survivors of the 1995 Srebrenica Genocide.

Theogene Kayitakire, a sergeant in the Rwandan Patriotic Army, helped capture the strategic high ground of the Mount Rebero neighborhood in Kigali in April 1994, just days after the Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda had begun. With the location secure and reinforcements arriving, Theogene had a request for his command: Could he go to save his relatives nearby? When given permission, he disguised himself in a government army uniform and, with a few other soldiers, went to find his uncle. But his uncle refused to flee to safety without his neighbors.

Rukesha’s testimony, along with six other interviews from The 600 documentary, was recently integrated into USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, which now holds 135 indexed and searchable interviews connected to the Genocide Against the Tutsi Rwanda. The majority of these testimonies were collected by Aegis Trust and the Kigali Genocide Memorial, in partnership with USC Shoah Foundation. The seven new testimonies include the first accounts of Rwandan liberators to be added to the collection.

Art and the Holocaust discusses the art of Holocaust survivor Dr. Viktor E. Frankl (author of Man’s Search For Meaning). This panel features Dr. Frankl’s grandson, Alexander Vesely-Frankl, a producer and award-winning documentary film director at Noetic Films in Los Angeles, California. He is also a licensed psychotherapist and head of the Viktor Frankl Media Archives in Vienna. Moderated by Stephen D. Smith, director of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute.

“How the Holocaust’s Jewish Calendars Bear Witness” Alan Rosen (Recipient of the 2020 Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research) April 21, 2021

Graduates of the Teaching with Testimony in the 21st Century professional development program came together last month to celebrate the program's 10th anniversary in Hungary. The event took place June 28-30th to commemorate the program's success and chart new opportunities for its graduates.

Carson Sizemore is already bracing for the tough conversations she will have in her 10th grade government class at her private high school in Albany, a small city on the banks of the Flint River in southwest Georgia. “I kind of have conflicting ideas with a lot of people in my family and my school. They’re more conservative, and I’m more in the middle somewhere,” Carson said. “I know there will be some debates in my government class.”

USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of Ruth Pearl, mother of slain Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl and co-founder and CFO of The Daniel Pearl Foundation, which promotes cross-cultural understanding through journalism and music.

Suzy Ressler, a survivor of Auschwitz who parlayed her family’s old-world recipes into the Philadelphia-based Mrs. Ressler’s Food Products, died July 3, 2021, at the age of 93. She was remembered for her business savvy, her warmth and generosity, and her impeccable elegance.

USC Shoah Foundation and the Maimonides Institute for Medicine, Ethics and the Holocaust are partnering to develop new and innovative educational programing on medical ethics and the Holocaust. The Holocaust marked a profound and sadistic deviation from traditional notions of medical ethics, with medical and scientific communities in the Third Reich actively participating in the labeling, persecution and eventual mass murder of millions deemed “unfit.”

On August 2, 1944, nearly 3,000 Roma and Sinti women, men and children were murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

There is gratitude deep inside of grief. A feeling of, how lucky was I to have this friendship at all. That’s how I feel about my dear Rabbi Bent Melchior who passed away in Copenhagen on July 28, 2021. He was 92-years-old.

​We Share the Same Sky weaves together the stories of these two young women--Hana as a refugee who remains one step ahead of the Nazis at every turn, and Rachael, whose insatiable curiosity to touch the past guides her into the lives of countless strangers, bringing her love and tragic loss. Throughout the course of her twenties, Hana's history becomes a guidebook for Rachael in how to live a life empowered by grief.

In partnership with Aspen Film, the event series opens with a screening and special panel discussion of the award-winning feature film My Name Is Sara. The film is based on the true story of 13-year-old Sara Góralnik, who, after escaping a Jewish Ghetto in Poland and losing her family at the outset of the Holocaust, hides in plain sight, passing as an Orthodox Christian, and ultimately survives against all odds.

Recently released by Focus Features, Final Account, the documentary from Participant Media, shares never-before-seen interviews with the last living generation of people to have participated in Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. Filmed over a 10-year period, the timely documentary raises questions about authority, conformity, complicity, perpetration, national identity, and responsibility, as men and women—ranging from former SS members to civilians—reckon with their memories, perceptions, and personal appraisals of their role in the Holocaust.

For decades Nathan Poremba deflected his son Joel’s questions about his experiences as a child during the Holocaust. But when an interview with USC Shoah Foundation inspired Nathan to talk, Joel could not bear to face his father’s past. It would take a fateful trip to Israel 20 years later to bring the two together to explore the story.

Twenty years after the deadliest terrorist attack ever committed on U.S. soil, have we gained enough perspective to evaluate the impact of 9/11 on our society and heal the wounds of its aftermath? USC Shoah Foundation Finci-Viterbi Executive Director Stephen Smith joins leaders from New Ground, a Muslim-Jewish partnership for change; 30 Years After, an Iranian-American Jewish organization; and the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles for a discussion about the legacy of the September 11 attacks.

Produced by USC Shoah Foundation, the award-winning Two Sides of Survival brings together stories from the East and West, chronicling how Jews who fled the Nazis in Europe, and Chinese who were threatened by Japanese occupation, improbably found refuge close to one another in the 1930’s and during World War II. Buy ticket (Use discount code "Shoah Foundation" at checkout)