The Teaching with Testimony in the 21st Century program in Ukraine wasn’t Olena Bilchenko’s first experience teaching with the Visual History Archive. But the program gave her the opportunity to develop her own lessons for the first time, and she emerged with new skills and feeling a personal connection to Holocaust survivors and witnesses.

Ingrid Alexovics has graduated from USC Shoah Foundation’s Teaching with Testimony in the 21st Century program armed with a brand-new lesson about heroes to teach her students about empathy and responsibility while also learning English.

Henry Jenkins will bring his expertise in media studies, pedagogy and activism to USC Shoah Foundation’s Memory, Media and Technology: Exploring the Trajectories of Schindler’s List conference this November.

Through his work with the University of London Institute of Education’s Centre for Holocaust Education, Tony Cole teaches “hard to reach” students, who have social, emotional, behavioral or physical needs. But while these students face significant learning challenges, Cole has found IWitness to be an effective and powerful tool to teach them about the Holocaust.

At USC Shoah Foundation’s international conference this November, Aya Yadlin-Segal will present her research on a topic that is well-known to anyone who reads online news articles: user comments. Her presentation will look at how online comments in Israel are a platform of collective memory of the Holocaust.Yadlin-Segal is working toward her PhD in communication at Texas A&M University. At the University of Haifa, her master’s thesis was about the representation of Jewish immigrants and immigration in 1950s Israeli children’s magazines.

Three years after helping Aristotle University of Thessaloniki become a Visual History Archive access site in Greece, Paris Papamichos Chronakis will continue his relationship with the USC Shoah Foundation by presenting at its international conference in November.

After years of working with the USC Shoah Foundation and running the Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival, Hilary Helstein admits she still couldn’t make sense of the Holocaust. But through art, she found her way in – and so have audiences around the world who have watched her film As Seen Through These Eyes.

Since Barbara Jaffe first learned about the USC Shoah Foundation 10 years ago, she has participated in its Master Teacher professional development program, created her own IWitness activities, and has seen her students become just as affected by Holocaust survivor testimony as she is.

Judy LaPietra was one of the first to learn about USC Shoah Foundation’s new educational website, IWitness, and from then on she has remained one of its most avid users.LaPietra teaches eighth grade history at St. Mark Catholic School in Huntersville, NC, and also created and teaches three courses in the global studies department at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte: “The Legacy of the Holocaust,” “Bearing Witness to the Past:  A Journey to Auschwitz” and “Representations of the Holocaust.” She has even taken her college students on trips to Poland to visit Auschwitz.

USC Shoah Foundation’s Memory, Media and Technology: Exploring the Trajectories of Schindler’s List conference will welcome not just genocide, Holocaust and history scholars, but also experts in media and film. As panel moderator, Johanna Blakley is looking forward to the conference’s discussions of technology and digital communication.

Twenty years ago, David Strick photographed Steven Spielberg surrounded by 12 Holocaust survivors – illustrating in a single frame the work and mission of the newly-founded Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation.On a cool day this January, Spielberg again posed for a photo by Strick; only this time, students from middle school to college stood around him. This is the Shoah Foundation today.

While re-watching Schindler’s List before applying to present at USC Shoah Foundation’s upcoming international conference “Memory, Media and Technology: Exploring the Trajectories of Schindler’s List,” Peg LeVine was struck by the numerous examples of “ritual annihilation” perpetrated against the Jews in the film, such as the ransacking of synagogues and homes and the destroying of religious objects.

In MemoriumOur friend and fellow scholar Harry Reicher passed away October 27, 2014.

IWitness has gone through many changes since Michael Berson and his doctoral education students were among the first to pilot it three years ago. But for Berson, IWitness remains one of the most valuable tools for engaging students with testimony and teaching them about the Holocaust and other topics.

The students in Leslie Schaffer’s Holocaust studies elective last semester didn’t visit a Holocaust museum – with the help of IWitness, they created their own.Schaffer, a guidance counselor at Abbeville High School in Greenville, SC, who also teaches an interdisciplinary Holocaust elective course, said because the school isn’t located close enough to a Holocaust museum for the students to visit, her class came up with the idea to make their own museum at their school. She discovered IWitness while brainstorming for the project and thought immediately that it would be “perfect.”

Marianna Bergida grew up with little knowledge of most of her family – her mother, sister, cousins, grandparents, aunts and uncles were killed in Auschwitz when she was very young, and her father couldn’t speak about his own experiences during the Holocaust. Determined to not let other descendants of survivors lose their family history as she had, Bergida became an interviewer for the Shoah Foundation and ended up interviewing one of the real-life inspirations of Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List.

Melissa Kravetz and Jenna Leventhal first met as undergraduate history majors at UC Santa Barbara over 10 years ago. Now, they are working together to introduce students to testimony through IWitness.

Simone Gigliotti teaches in the history program at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, and is a member of the Holocaust Geographies Collective, a group of researchers who study the Holocaust in terms of geography and movement of survivors and victims. She is the first official visiting scholar to the Center, which includes a week-long residency for Gigliotti to conduct research in the Visual History Archive and give a public lecture at USC.

In a field dedicated to organizing and preserving information, it makes sense that USC Shoah Foundation archivists Sandra Aguilar and Daryn Eller say archivists are, as a whole, a particularly helpful bunch.“That’s what we do – we share information from the archive to the public and to our users and researchers, and we also share information with each other,” Aguilar said. “It’s a really nice community to be working in because of the people and how incredibly knowledgeable they are.”“It’s true,” Eller agreed. “It’s one of the professions that are about openness.”

Milena Santerini, a professor and representative in Italian Parliament, has been a longtime partner and supporter of the Giving Memory a Future project with USC Shoah Foundation. That’s because she believes it is vital to teach Italians the true story of the Roma/Sinti people so that this long-excluded minority can find its place in Italian life.

Brooke Horn inspires her students to think about how they can change the world. To do so, she drew on the first-ever IWitness Video Challenge, with award-winning results.Horn, a seventh and eighth grade language arts teacher at Coppell Middle School North in Texas, uses IWitness as a resource for her students to learn from survivors and apply lessons from testimony to current social topics.

USC Shoah Foundation’s work in France is led by historian Emmanuel Debono, who says it’s exciting to be involved in such a worldwide effort to teach and preserve history.

IWitness focuses heavily on the Holocaust, but the themes of tolerance and racism contained in its genocide survivor testimonies and activities help Steve Flynn teach his students important lessons about challenges they face in their own lives.

At the University of the Aegean in Greece, Pothiti Hantzaroula says IWitness helps her students understand the impact of the Holocaust on their own lives and the lives of others.

Though her students are only 10 or 11 years old, Suzi Gantz jumped at the chance to introduce them to IWitness for USC Shoah Foundation’s first elementary classroom pilot of a new IWitness activity.Gantz’s fifth grade class at O. A. Thorp Scholastic Academy in Chicago is currently pilot-testing an unpublished IWitness Mini Quest activity: “Use Your Voice Against Prejudice.” USC Shoah Foundation staff reached out to elementary teachers in the Chicago area for any who would be interested in piloting an IWitness activity, and Gantz was selected after a brief screening process.

Since graduating from USC Shoah Foundation’s Master Teacher Workshop in 2010, Hank Koransky has made IWitness an integral part of his teaching at Brentwood School in Los Angeles.Koransky is a history teacher, chair of the history department and dean of faculty at Brentwood School, and has taught courses on everything from Ancient and Medieval History to AP Comparative Government.

Though his students at Agohozo-Shalom Youth Village in Rwanda are all too familiar with genocide, Gamariel Mbonimana has found IWitness to be an engaging, powerful tool that sparks their curiosity.Agohozo-Shalom Youth Village (ASYV), in Rwamagana, is home to more than 500 orphaned and vulnerable children. Mbonimana teaches General Paper courses to upper secondary students and was one of the first teachers to attend USC Shoah Foundation’s IWitness educator training sessions at Kigali Genocide Memorial in 2013.

At the Canadian International School of Beijing (CISB), Gary Goodwin’s students represent an especially vast range of nationalities and backgrounds. So it’s only fitting that he uses IWitness to teach not just the Holocaust, but also the Nanjing Massacre and Rwandan Tutsi Genocide.Goodwin teaches 10th, 11th, and 12th grade humanities within CISB’s International Baccalaureate curriculum. He was inspired by Schindler’s List to get a master’s in history and from researching the movie discovered USC Shoah Foundation and IWitness.

By Cat VazquezWhen asked about what she does for a living, Judy Janec starts off with an explanation rather than a title. An average day at the office for her can take place anywhere, and at any time, but the assignment is the same: to index video testimonies from Holocaust survivors and witnesses. Often working from her laptop at a café or library, she closely watches the interviews, and using judgment and discretion, assigns key terms to each section of the testimony.

Even in the earliest days of the USC Shoah Foundation, a staff of hundreds worked around the world to conduct interviews and create educational materials that used testimony to teach about the Holocaust. Yet, if they were based oversees, they probably never had the opportunity to visit the foundation’s headquarters in Los Angeles. That was Annette Wulf until just a few months ago, when she visited the office for the first time.