More than 900 Holocaust testimonies recorded over four decades by the Jewish Family and Children Services Holocaust Center of San Francisco (JFCS) are now fully integrated into USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive as part of the Preserving the Legacy initiative.

"Stranded in Shanghai,” an exhibit featuring testimonies from the Visual History Archive, opened at the Jewish Museum in Prague on Thursday, May 11.

​Katja Schatte, a scholar of postwar East German Jewish history, will be in residence at USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research in spring 2017 as the Center’s 2016-17 Greenberg Research Fellow.

Educators can finish the school year with a three-part online professional development course from Echoes and Reflections on teaching the Holocaust using testimony from the Visual History Archive and other primary and secondary sources.

USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research will host a steady stream of undergraduate, graduate and faculty fellows this summer who will conduct research in the Visual History Archive for a wide range of projects and courses.

You never know what you will find in the Visual History Archive. You hear stories of survival, death, life, hope and even friendship amidst the chaos of genocide. Sidney Shafner and Marcel Levy have remained friends for over 70 years – since the liberation of the concentration camp Dachau.

Dan Stone, PhD, gave a public lecture at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, providing a glimpse into the work he has been doing on compressing the global history of concentration camps into 35,000 words to be published as part of the Very Short Introductions series by Oxford University Press.

USC Shoah Foundation’s ability to capture and preserve important information about each testimony has gotten a critical update.

Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Yom HaShoah as it’s known in Hebrew, commemorates and honors the victims and survivors of the Holocaust. This year, people around the world will remember the victims of the Holocaust May 4-5, 2016.

During her month in residence at USC Shoah Foundation, Walch will research the exclusion of German Jews from their own homeland during the Holocaust through Nazi policies restricting Jewish spaces and architecture.

USC Shoah Foundation’s Armenian Genocide Collection is in the process of being transcribed, translated and subtitled in English, so that more viewers can watch the testimonies given in the survivors’ native languages.

Professor Atina Grossmann gave a public lecture co-hosted by the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research and the USC Max Kade Institute, offering a different reading of World War II and the Holocaust by mapping Jewish death, survival, and displacement via what she called the geographical margins – the colonial and semi-colonial regions including the Soviet interior, Central Asia, Iran, and British India.

The 2016-2017 Center Fellow at USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research will be Alexander Korb, Ph.D., director of the Stanley Burton Centre for Holocaust & Genocide Studies at the University of Leicester and scholar of the Holocaust in southeastern Europe.

A few weeks ago, a student I was interviewing for a profile I was writing on him for USC Shoah Foundation’s website said something interesting: “Growing up Jewish, the Holocaust is pretty much always there.” I could identify. As someone who went to Hebrew school twice a week, every week, from the age of 5 to 13, the Holocaust was something I was always aware of. I was taught about it frequently, both in religious and regular school.

As the son of two survivors of the Shoah and the husband of a daughter of two survivors, identifying as the Next Generation has been the essence of who I am. It is the prism through which I see and evaluate all worldly events. It was particularly my father’s life that affected me the most. He truly was a “survivor." He survived the war running for his life through Russia, Siberian labor camps and other lands in Asia. He survived losing his parents, five of his sisters their husbands and children. He escaped from his hometown in the Russian sector to a displaced person camp in in the American sector. He survived as a refugee in Belgium and then as an immigrant in the United States. He survived the loss of his wife at a young age raising three children as a single parent in a foreign land.

Matsuoka interviewed hundreds of Nanjing Massacre survivors and perpetrators and is nicknamed "the conscience of Japan."

Across the United States and in Europe, USC Shoah Foundation is helping to commemorate Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, on May 4 and 5.

USC Shoah Foundation’s social media accounts helped thousands of people around the world share and commemorate Genocide Awareness Month this April with stories, photos, video clips and more.

Diana Hekimian, an active member of the Armenian community in Los Angeles, found an original copy of one of the earliest reports of the 1915 genocide in Armenia: "The Diyarbekir Massacres and Kurdish Atrocities," by Thomas Mugerditchian.

The education, community and peace-building Rwanda Peace Education Program (RPEP) has concluded after three years, and its partners have begun to evaluate the impact of USC Shoah Foundation’s role in the program, with positive results.

The young Nazi approached 13-year-old Szulem Czygielmamn as he walked on the sidewalk of Lubartowska Street in Lublin, Poland, and shoved him off the sidewalk. Szulem was lucky; Jews had died for less.