Indexing USC Shoah Foundation’s new testimony collection from Jewish Family and Children’s Services (JFCS) of San Francisco was an ideal continuation of the work Nancy Saul has done for much of her career. Saul spent 10 years as the reference and information services librarian at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles and also ran the center’s “Ask a Survivor” outreach program, so she was no stranger to testimony when she began working on the JFCS collection at USC Shoah Foundation in January 2014.

Adam Herceg, a Teaching with Testimony in the 21st Century graduate from Slovakia, marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day at his school on January 27 by showing testimony of a survivor his students already felt a strong connection to.

Marissa Roy says she didn’t quite know what to expect when she went to Rwanda on the 2013 Problems Without Passports trip – and she wants this year’s class to have the same experience.

Vicki Kessler’s students watch testimonies in IWitness to practice their French, and to enhance their study of the Holocaust and genocide.

Bobbie Downs saw firsthand how genocide affects people when she taught Sudanese refugees in Cairo, and she will expand on this knowledge when she joins survivors, educators, students and thousands of others to attend the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on January 27.

As School Library Media Specialist at Clark Mills Elementary School in Manalapan, New Jersey, Gail Murray introduces not just one class each year but many to USC Shoah Foundation testimony in order to supplement their learning about the Holocaust.Murray wanted to complement the fourth- and fifth grade units on the Holocaust with age-appropriate content in the library, so she researched possible websites, literature and videos that would enhance what they are learning in their classrooms. She said she felt that she “hit gold” when she found USC Shoah Foundation and IWitness.

Hema Panesar has just joined the USC Shoah Foundation education team as coordinator of educational programs, bringing experience in digital education, museums and history.Panesar received her bachelor’s degree in history from UC Berkeley and master’s in museum studies from New York University. Her master’s thesis was titled “Digitize Me: Museum Educators and Their Digital Oriented Visitors,” and it focused on how museum visitors are becoming more central to the museum experience, particularly digitally and online.

Lyndsay Fleming teaches sixth grade social studies at East Cobb Middle School in Marietta, Georgia.I first learned about IWitness from Jane Moore during a professional learning day. I was interested in using the website in my classroom because of the primary and secondary sources and interviews of Holocaust survivors. One of the major benefits of the website is the premade lesson and activities as well as being able to create your own. 

On her first-ever trip outside North America, Barbara Fowler will join 24 other teachers from around the world to help commemorate the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in Poland by learning new methods for teaching the Holocaust.

USC Shoah Foundation is saddened to learn of the passing of Erna Viterbi, philanthropist and longtime supporter of USC Shoah Foundation.Erna Finci Viterbi, a descendant of Sephardic Jews, was born in Sarajevo but fled Yugoslavia with her family during World War II. They were deported to the Parma region of Italy and interned in the village Gramignazzo di Sissa, but were saved from deportation to the extermination camps by the townspeople. Erna and her family were able to escape to Switzerland for the rest of the war. In 1950, they moved to California.

Steven Howell realized how important it is to teach the Holocaust when he encountered anti-Semitism in his own classroom.He had just begun teaching at James A. Garfield High School, a small rural school in Garettsville, Ohio, when he found that the students had not read The Diary of Anne Frank. He taught them the historical context of the book, which they knew little about, but after two weeks he walked into his classroom to find a cross with two swastikas, on which was printed “Back off.”

The students in Lynne Ravas’ eighth grade English class at Lower Dauphin Middle School in Hummelstown, Penn., explore topics relating to the Holocaust not through research papers, but with videos in IWitness.

Rosa Lamb teaches 11th and 12th grade Global Studies: Holocaust and Genocide at Lake View High School in Chicago.How do you use IWitness in your class?I used it last year to have students make an IWitness video. The students created videos used for the purpose of teaching others about a specific theme or topic of the Holocaust. What kinds of reactions do students have to watching testimony?

For Johanna Söderholm, an English professor at Vaasa University and Abo Akademi University in Finland, there was no better time than now to go to Poland and participate in the Auschwitz: The Past is Present professional development program.

Traveling to Poland for Auschwitz: The Past is Present will be a homecoming of sorts for Sabina Kobinski, who will return to her family’s homeland and the place where her own uncle was imprisoned during the Holocaust.

Watch Shony Braun’s full testimony from the Visual History Archive as part of Comcast’s Days of Remembrance: PastFORWARD broadcast April 15-June 1, 2015.In the forests of Romania in 1934, four-year-old Shony Braun was out for a walk with his babysitter when he wandered off and became lost. A gypsy woman, hearing his cries and not knowing who he was or where he belonged, took him to the gypsy camp for safety. Upon their arrival, Shony’s attention was utterly transfixed by something: a violin. It was the most beautiful sound he had ever heard.

Rob Kuznia joined the communications department of USC Shoah Foundation as publicist last fall. Today, he is celebrating a major accomplishment from his previous life as a journalist: a Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting.

Julie Picard’s students in Sens, France, may have a future in journalism.

Diane Wohl first visited USC Shoah Foundation when it was housed in trailers on the Universal Studios backlot nearly 20 years ago, and her support for its mission and programs has only continued to grow over the years.

Michael Amerian is in Yerevan, Armenia, this week with staff of USC Shoah Foundation to commemorate the 100th anniversary the greatest tragedy in the country’s history.

Meg Lipstone and her son, Jack, 13, are eager to start spreading the word about IWitness as part of USC Shoah Foundation’s new IWitness Advocacy program.

Caroline Friend’s journey to becoming the winner of the Student Voices Short Film Contest first began two years ago – when she entered the contest and lost.That didn’t deter her from entering again this year, and her dedication paid off. The jury awarded her film Helen Lewis: A Survivor’s Story first place for the 2015 competition, putting Friend well on her way to her goal of becoming a historical filmmaker.

Scott Spencer was flying from Philadelphia to Los Angeles last May to meet up with his wife, who had just gotten a new job as the cantor of University Synagogue in Brentwood, when he struck up a conversation with the young girl sitting next to him.He asked her why she was traveling to Los Angeles. To his surprise, she said she was going to meet President Obama and present a documentary she had made for school.

Alice Herscovitch first became Executive Director of the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre in 2007, and it didn’t take long for her realize the incredible untapped resource that was the MHMC’s collection of 550 Holocaust survivor testimonies.“I knew we had an extraordinary collection, but for what?” Herscovitch recalled. “Why did we record these if we’re not going to do something with them?”

Ian McAvoy, an English teacher at University City High School in San Diego, discovered the IWitness Video Challenge and was so impressed that he invited staff from USC Shoah Foundation to give a presentation on IWitness to the other teachers at his school. One of those teachers, Susan Bristol, found it such a powerful experience that she adopted IWitness in her own classroom.

Professor Roy Schwartzman is proof that you don’t need to be a historian to make full use of the Visual History Archive in teaching and research.

After a career spent producing live events for television, working on Auschwitz: The Past is Present allowed Leslie Wilson to return to her early passion for history in what she calls a life-changing experience.

Dawn Skorczewski started out studying the role of the interviewer in Holocaust survivor testimony, but before long, she was captivated by the Visual History Archive’s great wealth of material on survivors from the Netherlands.

While most scholars listen to testimony for what survivors say about historical events and personal experiences, Isaac Bleaman studies how they say it.

Watch Henry Rosmarin’s full testimony from the Visual History Archive as part of Comcast’s Days of Remembrance: PastFORWARD broadcast April 15-June 1, 2015. The sound of a harmonica usually brings to mind playfulness, joy, a sense of merriment. For Henry Rosmarin, it is also conjures the darkest chapter of his life, when his talent for music earned him favor with a Nazi commandant and kept him alive in a German concentration camp.