In order to commemorate the genocides of the 20th century, Tigranna Zakaryan wants to start where many survivors ended up: Los Angeles.

Out of the dozens of films, concerts and other projects he’s worked on throughout his career, Steve Purcell says the USC Shoah Foundation-produced educational film One Day in Auschwitz is the most meaningful of them all.

Tenth grade world history teacher Joseph Christensen, from Northwest Career and Technical Academy in Las Vegas, is an avid user of IWitness after discovering it a year ago.Last year he attended a professional development program about teaching Holocaust in the classroom. One of the presenters showed the IWitness website and database and explained how he used it in his classroom. After searching through the website, Christensen decided to also give it a try.

Growing up, Addison Sandoval worked in his dad’s diesel repair shop in Compton, Calif., driving and delivering parts during the summers. It was there, encountering different people and places, that he learned to appreciate the values of humility, treating people with respect, and embracing people’s differences, he says.

Sally Ingram was first introduced to USC Shoah Foundation years ago, when her mother-in-law, Marione Ingram, gave her testimony to the Visual History Archive about her life in hiding during the war. Now, Ingram is using testimony and the IWitness Video Challenge to inspire her middle school students to deeply engage with survivors’ stories.

(Pickhan, left, and Bothe)USC Shoah Foundation has chosen its 2015 Teaching Fellows: Gertrud Pickhan and Alina Bothe, who will develop a seminar course as well as a public exhibition on the deportation of Polish Jews from Berlin at Freie Universität.Teaching Fellows receive a $2,000 stipend and $500 for course materials, and work with USC Shoah Foundation staff to develop their course. Their syllabi are published on the USC Shoah Foundation website, and fellows are expected to give a public presentation of their course at the end of the fellowship period.

The IWitness Summer Teaching Fellowship will provide an exciting and in-depth introduction to IWitness for Wesley Davidson.

When you use indexing terms to search through USC Shoah Foundation’s first 60 Armenian Genocide interviews in the Visual History Archive, or rely on the subtitles to understand the Armenian-language interviews, think of Hrag Yedalian.

Twenty years ago, memories of the Holocaust were too painful for Liliane Weissberg’s parents to give their testimonies to USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive. But Weissberg herself has taken on the mantle of studying and remembering the Holocaust as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and USC Shoah Foundation’s next Rutman Teaching Fellow.

Elizabeth Vitanza teaches her students a multitude of skills, including French, video editing and project management, when she does her IWitness unit each year.

USC Shoah Foundation began digitizing Holocaust testimony collections from Holocaust museums across North America last year as part of its Preserving the Legacy initiative. Ever since then, special staff members like Kadie Seitz have been hard at work indexing those thousands of testimonies in preparation for their integration into the Visual History Archive.

Watch Judith Goldstein’s full testimony from the Visual History Archive as part of Comcast’s Days of Remembrance: PastFORWARD broadcast April 15-June 1, 2015. From her childhood in Vilna, Poland, to her adult life in the United States, the arts have rarely been very far from Judith Goldstein.

(Alex Biniaz-Harris, left, and Ambrose Soehn)The composers behind the three-movement piano piece featured in the documentary Melodies of Auschwitz, now playing on Comcast Xfinity’s Days of Remembrance: PastFORWARD broadcast, reunited for a screening and concert at USC’s Brain and Creativity Institute this week and spoke candidly about their journey from page to performance.

Barbara Wahlberg can trace her passion for teaching the Holocaust back to one breakfast in Long Island, New York.She was at a restaurant with her husband when she noticed something unusual about the cook who brought out their food: he had a number tattooed on his arm.She asked her husband what it was, and he told her it meant that the man had been in a concentration camp in Europe during World War II. Wahlberg had never heard of these tattoos, and was shocked that this man – so tall and strong – had experienced such an injustice.

Most students give their teachers gifts of coffee mugs, chocolate, or flowers. This year, Eden Strunk’s students pooled their resources and found her a Cambodian genocide survivor to speak to the class.Strunk had inspired them to care about human rights and genocide just as she inspired Ruth Hernandez, a ninth grader at Esperanza Charter Academy in Philadelphia who won USC Shoah Foundation’s first-ever IWitness Video Challenge last year. Strunk had assigned the challenge to her “advisory” class – a course devoted to getting students more engaged in their school and community.

Emma Heintz and Natalia Podstawka had watched many testimony clips in search of the perfect one to use for their IWitness Video Challenge project. When they found Dina Gottliebova-Babbitt talking about a receiving a smile from a stranger, they knew it was the one.

When reading a published article or book, it can be easy to forget how many hundreds of hours of research the author put in in order to bring the project to fruition. Many scholars do this research completely on their own, but some are lucky enough to have an assistant.

One night last week, Megan Maybray was panicking.A Holocaust survivor named Rita Ross was visiting her school, Kennett Middle School near Philadelphia, the next day, but Maybray was having trouble teaching her ESL students about the Holocaust. Her students are new arrivals to the United States and most know little English. Maybray had never really taught the Holocaust before and could tell that her previous attempt to introduce them to the basics had not had much of an impact.

Lisa Farese is no stranger to encouraging her students to change the world.This was the ninth year the English language arts teacher at Douglas Middle School has assigned her students a project called iCan Change the World and her first time including the IWitness Video Challenge as a component of that project. And just like that, her students Natalia Podstawka and Emma Heintz won the 2015 national IWitness Video Challenge competition.

By Josh GrossbergUnwilling to acquiesce to the demands of a shameful ideology, a German Nazi rescues a group of Jews by putting them to work in a factory during World War II. He saves about 1,200 people, but by the end of the war, he despairs that he didn’t do enough. He returns to civilian life in anonymity, but is later recognized as a Righteous Among the Nations by the State of Israel.

Watch Alice Herz Sommer’s full testimony from the Visual History Archive as part of Comcast’s Days of Remembrance: PastFORWARD broadcast April 15-June 1, 2015.Perhaps no musical Holocaust survivor is more well-known and beloved than Alice Herz Sommer.

Cameron Gupton joins the first cohort of IWitness Fellows passionate about IWitness and looking forward to learning new methods for teaching the Holocaust.Gupton has been teaching American History for two years and has worked in both traditional schools and early colleges, including Greene Early College High School in North Carolina. Gupton has been a Teach For America Corps Member, a Gilder Lehrman Seminar participant at Stanford University, and serves on numerous committees at the school level.

USC Shoah Foundation’s first-ever Texas A&M teaching fellow Adam R. Seipp is drawing on the Visual History Archive to help him fill some pretty big shoes.Seipp, a professor of history, will be taking over Texas A&M’s Introduction to the Holocaust course following the retirement of beloved Professor Arnold Krammer. The course is one of the most popular at the school, so teaching it is an incredible responsibility, Seipp said – but, he’ll do it with the support of the A.I. and Manet Schepps Foundation Teaching Fellow program.

Melinda Goldrich continued her family’s tradition of philanthropy by hosting a special event to introduce a new audience in Aspen, Colo., last night to the work of USC Shoah Foundation.

Nearly six months after traveling to Poland with USC Shoah Foundation, Soljane Quiles is getting back on a plane and heading to Los Angeles for another program: the first-ever IWitness Teacher Fellowship.At The Highlander Charter School in Rhode Island, Quiles currently teaches 9th and 10th grade history and has been a featured community panelist and award recipient for her dedication to civics education.

It is time for USC Shoah Foundation to welcome its next Austrian Holocaust Memorial Service Ambassador.

Zach Albert’s journey to USC Shoah Foundation to work as an indexer on the Jewish Family and Children’s Services (JFCS) of San Francisco Holocaust testimony collection began when he was 12 years old and preparing for his bar mitzvah.Albert was volunteering at the Dallas Holocaust Museum and had become totally captivated by the survivors he met there – they were like his surrogate grandparents, he said. When it came time for him to decide on a community service project for his bar mitzvah, he noticed that the museum was lacking something important: a Torah scroll.

Madelon Bino and her husband Raoul weren’t quite ready to leave USC Shoah Foundation’s office in Los Angeles when the monthly public visit they attended on July 23 concluded.Instead, they headed straight for a computer as intern Sebastian Goditsch showed them how to access the Visual History Archive and start watching testimony. After just a few minutes, Madelon pointed at the screen and smiled.“That’s one of the interviews I did,” she said.

Former Auschwitz: The Past is Present teacher Miljenko Hajdarovic announced that he has been chosen to join 300 other educators to completely reform the Croatian national curriculum.

Echoes and Reflections inspired Julia Wood's class to make a big effort to promote awareness of the Holocaust in their community.At East Valley Academy in Mesa, Ariz., Wood uses the 10 modules of Echoes and Reflections, which each includes primary sources and testimony clips, to teach about the Holocaust. She attended an Echoes and Reflections educator seminar last summer and said it was “phenomenal,” and even inspired her to teach a semester-long Holocaust literature elective.