Longtime USC Shoah Foundation board member Mickey Shapiro has given a gift to fund an endowed research fellowship program at the Institute’s Center for Advanced Genocide Research in honor of his parents, Sara and Asa Shapiro, who both survived the Holocaust.

Moshe Avital describes the two public schools in Czechoslovakia and how most Jewish students went to the Czech school and the non-Jewish students went to the Russian school. His Czech school was very strict and taught at a very high level, which provided him the opportunity to learn about Czech language, literature, geography, and many other subjects.

USC Shoah Foundation spent seven months researching the identities of every child in the liberation photo of the children behind the barbed wire, and reunited four of them January 26, 2015, in Krakow.

USC Shoah Foundation is sorry to learn of the passing of Aleksander Laks, the first Holocaust survivor to give his testimony to USC Shoah Foundation in Brazil and a special friend of the Institute. Laks passed away July 21 at age 88. Laks survived the Lodz Ghetto, Auschwitz and a death march as a teenager. He immigrated to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and became a leader of the survivor community there as president of the Sherit Hapleita (Holocaust survivors’ organization).

USC Shoah Foundation is saddened to learn of the passing of Johnny Strange, a record-holding adventurer and supporter of USC Shoah Foundation.

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.

We are sad to learn of the passing of Thomas Blatt, a Holocaust survivor who was one of the few people to survive an escape from the Sobibor death camp in 1943. He was 88. Born April 15, 1927, in Lublin, Poland, Blatt also served as a witness at the 2009 trial of the camp guard John Demjanjuk.

USC Shoah Foundation is sad to learn of the passing of Sir Nicholas Winton, the organizer of the Czechoslovakian Kindertransport and one of the most beloved rescuers of the Holocaust. Winton was 106 years old.

Theodore Zev Weiss Holocaust Educational Foundation Professor at Northwestern University Peter Hayes examines antisemitism and homophobia as central components of Nazi racism.

USC Shoah Foundation is pleased to announce Stephen A. Cozen as chairman of its Board of Councilors.

At a time when antisemitism is on the rise, USC Shoah Foundation’s Countering Antisemitism Through Testimony program aims to push back against its spread. The Institute has been recording video testimonies of people whose lives have been disrupted by contemporary acts of violent or virulent antisemitism, as well as experts on the matter and advocates who have made a dedicated effort to counter the hate. This video includes excerpts of testimonies from survivors and witnesses of a synagogue attack in Copenhagen that USC Shoah Foundation recorded for this new collection.