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As a featured speaker at the 2014 Ambassadors for Humanity gala in Los Angeles, Michelle Sadrena Clark said that the USC Shoah Foundation had changed her life and her teaching. “We learned about that last year” is something a teacher never wants to hear her students say, but those are exactly the words Michelle Sadrena Clark heard from her students. What concerned her most was that they were talking about the Holocaust, as if it were just another history topic to cover once and then check off the list.
teacher, high school, california, mtw, Michelle Clark / Thursday, May 8, 2014
Born in Tunisia in 1940, Jacqueline Gmach left at the age of 18. Though her family was not directly in danger, the Nazi genocide remains deeply personal to her. She has devoted her career to educating people about its horrors as well as promoting the Jewish culture its executioners tried to obliterate. A scholar with degrees and credentials from institutions ranging from the Sorbonne in Paris to the University of Jerusalem and the University of Montreal, Gmach serves as project director for USC Shoah Foundation’s Testimonies of North Africa and the Middle East project.
Gmach, sephardi, mizrahi, collection, archive, vha / Friday, April 11, 2014
Paulin Ndahayo is quickly proving to be one of the newest and most passionate ambassadors of IWitness in Rwanda. Ndahayo teaches political education and literature at Gashora Girls Academy in the Bugesera district in eastern Rwanda. He attended the first Rwandan IWitness teacher training at Kigali Genocide Memorial Center (KGMC) in November 2013 and, with his colleague Penelope Aryatugumya, will conduct a pilot of his first IWitness lesson at his school this year.
/ Monday, January 6, 2014
Sara Greenberg was so moved by her grandparents’ stories of survival and resilience during the Holocaust that she made a film to honor their history and inspire others to act out against genocide.
/ Wednesday, January 8, 2014
Ellie Ferd has a pretty clear understanding of the Holocaust: “It’s not human,” the 12-year-old said. “It’s not something that should happen.”
/ Friday, January 10, 2014
One of the first researchers to examine USC Shoah Foundation’s new Rwandan Tutsi Genocide collection is Samantha Lakin, a former Fulbright scholar and master’s candidate at Tufts University.
/ Monday, January 13, 2014
Dozens of college students conduct research in the Visual History Archive for their thesis projects at the USC Shoah Foundation every year. One student, however, is writing her senior thesis on the Shoah Foundation itself.
/ Wednesday, January 15, 2014
Davis Wamonhi’s own students at Kagarama Secondary School in Kigali, Rwanda, inspired him to use IWitness in his classroom.Wamonhi’s history students were invited to attend an IWitness pilot at Gisozi Genocide Memorial, where they were introduced to learning history through video testimonies through USC Shoah Foundation’s interactive educational website.
a70, educator / Wednesday, April 2, 2014
After working as an undergraduate intern at USC Shoah Foundation, Gabby Sharaga is now using testimony in her own classes as a student teacher. Sharaga interned in external relations and education (where she helped develop the IWitness website) at USC Shoah Foundation after conducting a research project using testimony for Genocide and Terrorism, a political science course at USC.
/ Thursday, January 16, 2014
Twenty years after her family fled the Rwandan genocide, Rose Twagiramariya has returned to Rwanda to work for USC Shoah Foundation.Twagiramariya was born in Rwanda and left with her family in July 1994 during the genocide, when she was six years old. The family lived in a refugee camp in the Congo, Senegal, and Maryland before settling in Louisville, Kent., in 1999.
/ Wednesday, January 22, 2014
Interviewing Holocaust survivors for the Shoah Foundation in the 1990s was a “second film school” for filmmaker Rafael Lewandowski, and an experience he still draws on today.
/ Friday, January 24, 2014
For the next two months, three staff members from Aegis Trust in Rwanda are getting in-depth training in indexing genocide survivor testimony right here at the USC Shoah Foundation.
/ Tuesday, January 28, 2014
Intern Fiona Guo was able to utilize her Chinese heritage and interest in intercultural communication while working on the new Nanjing Massacre testimony collection at USC Shoah Foundation.
/ Friday, January 31, 2014
While protests rage in Ukraine, many Ukrainian teachers are committed to introducing new human rights educational materials to their classrooms. Olha Pedan Slyepukhina has taught middle- and high school history and social studies for 32 years in Ukraine. She was first introduced to the Shoah Foundation in 2007, participating in a teaching seminar called “Encountering Memory” about the film Spell Your Name, which was produced by the Shoah Foundation.
/ Monday, February 3, 2014
High school vice principal Tetyana Kozhevnikova is eager to share with teachers and students all over Ukraine what she learned at the November 2013 teacher training workshop in Kyiv on the use of a new multimedia teacher’s guide titled Where do Human Rights Begin: History and Contemporary Approaches.
/ Wednesday, February 5, 2014
He just graduated from high school last year, but Manuel Müller has already begun his first full-time job as USC Shoah Foundation’s 2014 Austrian Holocaust Memorial Service intern.
/ Friday, February 7, 2014
Sarah Miller gave testimony to the USC Shoah Foundation in 1997 about her family’s experiences hiding in France and Switzerland during the Holocaust – but she wasn’t finished telling her story just yet.
/ Monday, February 10, 2014
Peter Berczi began working as a librarian at Budapest's Central European University in 2009 –the same year that CEU became a Visual History Archive Access site. But more and more, he says, he thinks this coincidence was meant to be. Berczi helps professors at CEU find testimonies to use in their courses and conducts sessions to teach their students how to use the archive. He also conducts Visual History Archive trainings for local secondary educators as part of the Teaching with Testimony in the 21st Century professional development program.
/ Wednesday, February 12, 2014
Filmmaker Sam Kadi says he’ll be looking for honest, impactful storytelling when he helps judge the entries for this year’s Student Voices Short Film Contest. Kadi – an “engineer by trade, filmmaker by choice,” he says – came to the United States from Syria in his ‘20s and began making short films and documentaries after a stint as a theatrical actor, writer, and director. He graduated from the Motion Picture Institute of Michigan in 2007 and wrote and directed several narrative and documentary films including the award-winning short film Raised Alone in 2009.
/ Friday, February 14, 2014
Twelve years after being part of the team that designed the interface of the Visual History Archive, Ella Belzberg has made a detailed examination of the process her dissertation at the UC Santa Barbara Gevirtz Graduate School of Education.
/ Wednesday, February 19, 2014
Martin Šmok was making a documentary film in the summer of 1994 about the Jewish underground movement in Slovakia during World War II when he realized that the key witnesses he needed to interview all lived far away from his home in the Czech Republic. While looking for help, he came across the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, then just beginning its quest to interview 50,000 Holocaust survivors and witnesses around the world. Šmok was hired as an interviewer.
/ Friday, February 21, 2014
Monika Koszyńska says she feels privileged to be USC Shoah Foundation’s international liaison in Poland, but is also acutely aware of the magnitude of work to be done.Koszyńska joined the USC Shoah Foundation staff as its international liaison in Poland in 2002, though she had been familiar with Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation since the mid-1990s, when she was a teacher at a primary school.
/ Tuesday, February 25, 2014
Rwandan filmmaker Eric Kabera will travel from Hillywood (Rwanda’s burgeoning film industry named after the country’s famously hilly landscape) to Hollywood to help judge this year’s Student Voices Short Film Contest.
/ Thursday, February 27, 2014
The stories of musicians during the Holocaust guided Syuzanna Petrosyan and Greg Irwin through the Student Voices Short Film Contest, and the result is their winning film Play for Your Life.Petrosyan, a master’s candidate in public diplomacy, and Irwin, a senior international relations major, are both interns at the USC Shoah Foundation and members of its student organization, SFISA.
/ Monday, March 3, 2014
Shirin Raban was just beginning work on her thesis, a short film about Persians’ observations of Passover in Los Angeles, when she decided to take on the Student Voices Short Film Contest.Raban is a master’s candidate in visual anthropology at USC with a background in graphic design. Another contestant in the Student Voices contest, Syuzanna Petrosyan, told Raban and her anthropological media seminar classmates about Student Voices and showed them some of her own work-in-progress.
/ Tuesday, March 4, 2014
Rebecca Baugh tells the heart-wrenching story of Noemi  Ban in her entry to the Student Voices Short Film Contest.In her film, Baugh, a junior international relations global business major, includes historical footage and film clips to supplement Ban’s retelling of how she, as a teenager, took care of her younger siblings in the ghetto and finally watched her family disappear into the gas chamber.“I loved that [the USC Shoah Foundation] takes these huge historical events that we study and made them personal,” Baugh said.
/ Thursday, March 6, 2014
As an IWitness regional consultant, Brandon Barr sees firsthand the impact testimony can have on both students and teachers.Barr teaches eighth grade reading and writing at Nightingale Elementary in Chicago, where he uses IWitness, USC Shoah Foundation’s educational website, to teach about the Holocaust. As an IWitness regional consultant, he is responsible for leading IWitness teacher training programs and introducing IWitness to schools in his area.
/ Monday, March 10, 2014
At 88 years old, Holocaust survivor Sonia Warshawski still has a lot left to teach us.That’s why her granddaughter, film producer/director Leah Warshawski, has begun shooting a documentary called Big Sonia to share the tenacious octogenarian’s incredible life story with the next generation.
/ Wednesday, March 12, 2014
Over 15 years after he worked as assistant international production coordinator at the Shoah Foundation, Joshua Belkind still regards the experience as one that influenced where he is today.Belkind began interning as an assistant videographer at the Shoah Foundation when he was an undergraduate film major at the University of Southern California around 1995. Over the summer, he said, he recorded 10 interviews a week. He ended up doing over 100 interviews.
/ Friday, March 14, 2014
After traveling to Rwanda on last summer’s problems Without Passports course, Rebecca Homan is one of the newest interns at the USC Shoah Foundation.
/ Monday, March 17, 2014

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