Liz Bommarito has been using IWitness in her English classes at Midwood High School in Brooklyn for the past two years. Her senior class is currently working on the IWitness Video Challenge, and this year each student has an extra incentive to win: The top five students, as voted by the class, will attend USC Shoah Foundation’s annual Ambassadors for Humanity Gala on Thursday.

Lyndell Higgins wanted to teach people about the Holocaust. So, she started to dance. Higgins is the founding director of the Los Angeles-based Stretch Dance Company, which she created in 2010.  The company recently debuted its first full-length dance production, I Have Lived A Thousand Years, based on the popular memoir of Holocaust survivor Dr. Livia Bitton-Jackson. Bitton-Jackson’s testimony is in USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive.

As president of the Koret Foundation and chairman of Taube Philanthropies, Tad Taube has contributed millions to philanthropic causes around the world. But he says his dedication to USC Shoah Foundation is simply “a natural thing to do.” Taube and his parents fled Poland in 1939 and ultimately settled in Los Angeles. After getting his master’s in industrial engineering from Stanford, Taube was one of the creators of E-H Research Laboratories and began a career in real estate.

As USC Shoah Foundation celebrated the launch of the 45th Visual History Archive full access site in the world at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) in Hungary last week, ELTE presented George Schaeffer with its most prestigious award, the Senate Medal. Through his philanthropic organization, the George W. Schaeffer Family Foundation, Schaeffer donated the Visual History Archive’s subscription fee, allowing the archive to be accessible to students, faculty and researchers at ELTE for the next three years.

Jennifer Goss designed the new IWitness Information Quest activity about Kristallnacht to teach students about the complexities of one of the most important turning points of the Holocaust.