The Institute mourns the passing of members of our community in 2020, including survivors who have given testimony Hanna Pankowsky, Dario Gabbai, Anneliese Nossbaum, Éva Székely,

Pictured: Holocaust survivor Elly Gotz who gave his testimony to the Azrieli Foundation in 2018. His interview is one of 31 new testimonies from the Azrieli Foundation that have been indexed and catalogued in the Visual History Archive. This week’s semi-annual VHA release adds 128 new testimonies to the 55,000-strong collection. All the updated testimonies are available at 163 access sites worldwide.

June 19, also known as Juneteenth, commemorates the day in 1865 when slavery ended in America - more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued by President Lincoln. It is a day of commemoration and celebration of African American history and heritage, but also a day of reflection.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, USC Shoah Foundation education team has adapted its already robust online content and tools in IWitness to meet current educational demands for online teaching and learning.

This webinar is developed for an educator, university, and community member audience. It is not intended for K-12 students.

The Institute is sad to learn that world champion swimmer and Holocaust survivor Éva Székely passed away at 92.

I much enjoyed my stay at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research in early March, just before the pandemic turned all of our lives upside down. Meeting the wonderful members of the staff and seeing how much the operations of both the Foundation and the Center have grown since my last visit in 2014 were remarkable experiences.

I had the opportunity to research the USC Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive this past summer thanks to the Beth and Arthur Lev Student Research Fellowship. I was initially introduced to the archive through a course taught by Dr. Maria Zalewska in the School of Cinematic Arts entitled “Meme, Myself and I: How We Remember in the Digital Age.” Prior to the course, I was unaware of this resource at USC despite having a visual art practice deeply engaged with Holocaust remembrance and archives.

With a focus on our first-ever podcast, We Share The Same Sky, join us for a conversation of the digital impacts of testimony, featuring We Share the Same Sky producer Rachael Cerrotti.

Wilma Bulkin Siegel was seven years old in 1945 when her father took her to the movies to watch newsreels of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. “Why couldn’t I have done something about it?” she whispered to her father. Decades later, Siegel, a retired New York City oncologist and a pioneer in hospice care, has discovered a new tool for making an impact: a paintbrush.

The ties between Cornell University and USC Shoah Foundation are many, and now, they are permanent: The Cornell University Library has acquired access to the Visual History Archive in perpetuity. Cornell University became the 52nd site to provide full access to the archive on an annual basis in November 2015, and the impact on research and education has been significant. This impact can now continue for generations to come, as the witnesses who gave testimony had hoped.

We mourn the murder of George Floyd and join the outcry for justice in his name. He is now linked to countless others who have suffered systemic violence, injustice and hate perpetrated against African Americans throughout a 400-year history in this nation. This legacy and manifestation of hate is still present today.

The elderly population is among the hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the victims include a large and growing number of Holocaust survivors and World War II veterans.

An online lecture by Allison Somogyi (Yale University and University of Southern California) 2019-2020 USC-Yale Postdoctoral Research Fellow Organized by the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research Supported by the USC Libraries Collection Convergence Initiative 

Over the past five years, USC Shoah Foundation has documented the stories of experts and witnesses to contemporary antisemitism as part of our Countering Antisemitism Through Testimony Program (CATT).  

From visiting family in China during summer breaks growing up, I became acutely aware of the devastation and suffering that occurred during the Japanese occupation of our hometown of Nanjing. Museums, movies, television programs, and commemorative art kept the Nanjing Massacre alive in public memory. But what I also noticed, from visits to museums, shuffling through television channels, and discussions with family, was the seeming absence of Chinese resistance.

The 45-minute program will feature Mona Golabek, Grammy-nominated concert pianist and author of The Children of Willesden Lane. Ms. Golabek will explore key parts of her book and perform piano classics, guiding students to consider the question: What can I hold on to in my life to help me be resilient in times of change?

Lauren Cantillon, a PhD candidate in the Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries at King’s College, London, has been awarded the 2020-2021 Robert J. Katz Research Fellowship in Genocide Studies at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research. She will be in residence at the Center in Spring 2021 in order to conduct research for her dissertation, entitled “Remembering and Remediating Women’s Stories of Sexual Violence during the Holocaust.”

USC Shoah Foundation announced a new partnership with Ancestry® to provide free access to searchable data from nearly 50,000 Jewish Holocaust survivor testimonies that are in the Visual History Archive® (VHA). “We are grateful that Ancestry is providing access to this initial set of metadata and enhancing the discoverability of our archive and this critically important history,” said Stephen Smith, Finci-Viterbi Executive Director at USC Shoah Foundation. Here’s how it works:

7 December 2020 - 7PM EST/4PM PST/11AM AEDT+1 This program is sponsored by the Goldrich Family Foundation. Join USC Shoah Foundation and the Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival for a special screening of The Tattooed Torah followed by a post-screening Q&A moderated by USC Shoah Foundation Finci-Viterbi Executive Director, Stephen Smith.

Hosted by USC Shoah Foundation Executive Committee member Trudy Elbaum Gottesman, join moderator Finci-Viterbi Executive Director Stephen D. Smith in an intimate conversation with journalist Rachael Cerrotti, whose grandmother Hana, a Holocaust survivor, is the subject of her podcast series We Share The Same Sky, recognized by the Huffington Post as one of the top recommended podcasts of 2019. 27 May 6:00PM EDT | 3:00PM PDT | 8:00AM AEST 28 May

Malmö Museums invites you to the grand opening of Speaking Memories — The Last Witnesses of the Holocaust on June 11, 2020 at 6:00 PM GMT+2 (9:00 AM PDT) at Slottsholmen, Malmö Museums Participants include:

The portrait I have been working on of Dario isn’t complete yet, but what an honor it was to have met him and is now to engage with his testimony through the act of painting,” said David Kassan of hi

USC Shoah Foundation today mourns the loss of a close friend, George Weiss, a longtime volunteer with the Institute and a Holocaust survivor who endured homelessness and life on the run as a young child separated from his parents in both France and Belgium during the war. He was 87. Weiss was a familiar and beloved presence at the offices of the Institute, stopping in every week to curate and work with clips of video testimony from the Visual History Archive, which contains 55,000 life stories of survivors and witnesses to the Holocaust and other genocides.

Museum Visitors engage with Interactive Biography of Acclaimed Cellist and German-Born Holocaust Survivor Anita Lasker Wallfisch.

Alan Auyeung pulled on a pair of latex gloves and a N95 face mask. For good measure, he placed a pair of protective goggles over his eyes too. A trip to the supermarket? In these Covid-19 times, it could have been but, in fact, Auyeung was preparing for a task of quite a different nature: saving the testimonies of Holocaust survivors, whose eye witness accounts of Nazi atrocities were at risk of being eaten away by mold.

We are very saddened at the USC Shoah Foundation to learn that our friend and Holocaust survivor Itka Zygmuntowicz passed away October 9, 2020, at the age of 94.

I never intended to spend months listening to Holocaust testimonies.  My name is Chaya Nove, I am a sociolinguist working on a doctoral dissertation about language change in Yiddish vowels. In my research, I consider the Yiddish spoken by Hasidic Jews in New York today (Hasidic Yiddish, or HY) as a living, changing language, with the understanding that this language was once spoken by a group of people in another time and place. 

This summer, USC Shoah Foundation education team hosted their annual Leadership Workshop—Action and Values presented by the William P. Lauder Junior Internship Program. The workshop calls for applicants who are preparing themselves to be in leadership positions in their communities. The focus is to cultivate, through the power of testimony, the confidence and courage to be an upstander. Testimonies, with their powerful universal messages, instill in students the importance of personal stories, values, and agency.

As local communities assess and adjust to the needs of the world community—and as many schools shift from in-person to virtual classrooms—IWitness and its standards-aligned resources are ready to help educators and parents support students learning.