About a year after I joined USC Shoah Foundation, I was invited to be the keynote speaker at the Sarah and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre’s Holocaust Education Week in Toronto. The theme that year was about memory and they had graciously invited me, the new Director of Education, to discuss memory in the context of the Institute’s education platform IWitness and testimony-based education.

The National Science Foundation awarded the Shoah Foundation a grant of $7.5 million distributed over five years, to develop speech-recognition software for cataloging more than 116,000 hours of videotaped testimonies of Holocaust survivors and eyewitnesses, whose multilingual aspect poses special research challenges. As cataloging the testimonies is time-consuming and costly, particularly when it involves interviews in other languages, the NSF grant will support the development of a computer system that should be able to review the tapes and recognize important words and phrases.

Today Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation announced that Douglas Greenberg, PhD, has been named President and Chief Executive Officer. Dr. Greenberg's appointment as Shoah Foundation President and CEO will begin September 5, 2000.

Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation has added Hungary to the list of countries in which eyewitness testimonies have been recorded for its Archive. The Foundation, established in 1994 by Steven Spielberg after filming Schindler's List, is videotaping the testimonies of Holocaust survivors and other witnesses around the world.

Last night, Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation commemorated the recording of its 50,000th testimony with survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust. At a ceremony attended by over 400 people involved with the project, both at its Los Angeles headquarters and abroad, Shoah Foundation Founder and Chairman Steven Spielberg thanked everyone and announced the future direction of the organization. Spielberg told the group, "no one could have imagined the breadth of the undertaking we embarked on four years ago.

Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation in association with Maxell Corporation of America/Hitachi Maxell LTD and Burda Media is pleased to announce the release of Survivors: Testimonies of the Holocaust. The interactive CD-ROM, narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio and Winona Ryder, incorporates visual and oral histories recorded by the Shoah Foundation. It is the first educational CD-ROM from Steven Spielberg's nonprofit foundation.

Steven Spielberg, Founder and Chairman of Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, and Foundation Directors James Moll and June Beallor, announced today that Dr. Michael Berenbaum will join Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation in early January 1997 as President and CEO.