During Florida’s Holocaust Education Week, 12,000 students and educators from school districts across the state experienced a livestreamed theatrical performance and concert with author and virtuoso concert pianist Mona Golabek. A recording of the broadcast can be viewed on Facebook.

We are very saddened to learn of the passing of our dear friend and valued colleague Dr. Sharon Gillerman on November 20, 2020, at the age of 60.   Sharon was a scholar in Jewish history on faculty at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC) and at USC for more than 20 years. Her scholarship focused on modern German and central European Jewish history with a particular interest in gender history, cultural studies, popular culture, and transnational history.   

Dr. Judy Alpert is the child of Holocaust survivors. Judy was born in Hungary in 1946, after her parents were liberated from concentration camps. When she was 10, she and her parents escaped to the United States from Budapest during the 1956 revolution. Her husband, Mark, was born during World War II and is acutely aware that if he had been born where his grandparents fled the pogroms in the late 19th century, he would have not survived the Holocaust.

The Koret Foundation in San Francisco awarded a $1 million matching grant supporting a project that is a model for the preservation of Holocaust testimony around the world. The Institute partnered with the Jewish Family and Children’s Services Holocaust Center to digitize and preserve the Center’s videotaped Bay Area testimonies.

Lee Liberman has been a stalwart supporter of USC Shoah Foundation –The Institute for Visual History and Education since 1999 and a member of the Board of Councilors since 2007. A resident of Melbourne, Australia, Liberman is a dedicated philanthropist with charitable interests that extend to Israel, the United States and Africa.

Hearing Holocaust survivors tell their stories in person is a powerful experience — and one that Next Generation Council member Louis Smith worried would soon be lost forever. So when he learned about New Dimensions in Testimony, a project of USC Shoah Foundation — The Institute for Visual History and Education, he wanted to give to help realize its potential.

Masako Togo Kasloff and her late husband Philip were drawn to the USC Shoah Foundation Institute after hearing the testimony of Dario Gabbai, who was forced to work as a Sonderkommando at Auschwitz during the Holocaust.

Pears Foundation, based in London, England, is generously supporting News Dimensions in Testimony. Developed in collaboration with the USC Institute for Creative Technologies and Conscience Display, and supported by a consortium of committed donors, New Dimensions in Testimony (NDT) is a pioneer technology that allows visitors to engage in dialogue with photo-real projected images of Holocaust survivors.

Susan Crown understands the importance of inspiring future generations to achieve unimaginable goals. Her industrialist and philanthropist grandfather, Henry Crown, who founded Material Service, which merged with General Dynamics in 1959, inspired his son, Lester, who in turn, inspired Susan.

Although they did not meet until years later in New York, both Ulrika Citron and her husband, Joel, were born in Sweden, the children of survivors of the Holocaust. “His story is very different from mine,” she says. “We’re all unique stories.”

Wendy Smith Meyer first learned about the USC Shoah Foundation in 1996, when her parents, Alfred and Selma Benjamin, gave their testimony. She attended part of the interview, when her parents, who grew up in Nazi Germany, gave their first-person accounts of increasing Jewish persecution. Her uncles, Owen and Edgar Hirsch, and aunt Elise Le Hu also gave testimony.

Edward Mosberg was born in Krakow and survived the Krakow ghetto, Plaszow and Mathausen concentration camps, and slave labor at the Hermann-Goering factory. His entire family was murdered in the Holocaust. He endured further tribulations before sharing his testimony with USC Shoah Foundation. A nearly fatal auto accident prevented him from his first scheduled interview, while a stroke forced him to postpone the second.

Dimensions in Testimony: Interactive Biography in Spanish Aliza Liberman’s upbringing in Panama is inextricably tied to the Holocaust: it’s where her Polish-Jewish grandfather, a survivor, immigrated to after World War II. This deep connection to the Holocaust is the main reason Liberman chose to support the Institute’s Dimensions in Testimony (DiT) program, which enables people to engage with a prerecorded video image of a genocide survivor by asking him or her questions and hearing the survivor’s answers in real time.

I never intended to spend months listening to Holocaust testimonies.  My name is Chaya Nove, I am a sociolinguist working on a doctoral dissertation about language change in Yiddish vowels. In my research, I consider the Yiddish spoken by Hasidic Jews in New York today (Hasidic Yiddish, or HY) as a living, changing language, with the understanding that this language was once spoken by a group of people in another time and place. 

Chaya Nove is a PhD candidate in the Linguistics program at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY). Her research interests include sociolinguistics, phonetics, language variation and change, contact linguistics and bilingualism. She is currently working on a project to investigate variation and change in the vowel system of contemporary Hasidic Yiddish spoken in New York. She is also conducting acoustic analyses of European Yiddish using archival recordings. Visit her CUNY website profile here. 

Worried about conjuring bad memories, Ilse Delman was initially reluctant to share her story with USC Shoah Foundation — The Institute for Visual History and Education. But after meeting with Institute staff, encouraged by her friend Anita Mayer, who had contributed her own testimony, and supported by her husband, Abner Delman, M.D., she shared her memories. A decade later, she remains grateful that her story will live on through the archive.