/ Wednesday, September 16, 2020
Pinchas Gutter / Wednesday, September 16, 2020
USC Shoah Foundation and Discovery Education announced the winners of the 2020 Stronger Than Hate Challenge. The Challenge and the 2020 winners exemplify the power of youth voices to connect communities and the role of social and emotional learning in empowering students to overcome hate.
education, iwitness, sth, discovery education / Thursday, September 17, 2020
/ Thursday, September 17, 2020
/ Thursday, September 17, 2020
/ Thursday, September 17, 2020
View Dr. Ruth’s conversation with filmmakers, moderated by film journalist and historian Susan King and hosted by USC Shoah Foundation Finci-Viterbi Executive Director Stephen Smith, from this special museum event 15 September 2020.
/ Thursday, September 17, 2020
/ Monday, September 21, 2020
/ Tuesday, September 22, 2020
/ Tuesday, September 22, 2020
Few friends of USC Shoah Foundation have supported the Institute longer than Al Tapper. In the past two decades, he has provided essential funding for the Institute’s general operations, supporting activities across our research and education initiatives, and providing seed funding for new and innovative projects.
/ Wednesday, September 23, 2020
For nearly a decade, the Alpern Family Foundation has supported USC Shoah Foundation’s efforts to collect testimony and use them around the world to combat hatred and intolerance. Executive Director Rochelle Rubin says that the Alpern Family Foundation’s dedication to the Institute is motivated by its support of Holocaust education and belief that teaching tolerance and empathy is essential to counteract hatred.
/ Wednesday, September 23, 2020
For USC Rossier School of Education Professor Alan Arkatov, supporting USC Shoah Foundation is a family affair. Alan’s role started when he created USC Rossier’s Center EDGE (Engagement Driven Global Education) -- a new research center dedicated to educational innovation and cross-sector partnerships that focuses on student engagement.
/ Wednesday, September 23, 2020
Lindsey Spindle, President of the Jeff Skoll Group and a member of the Institute’s Next General Council, suggested we reach out to the team at the Skoll World Forum about our Dimensions in Testimony (DiT) program, given the obvious connection to theme of proximity. Now available in select museums, DiT is an interactive biography that enables people to ask questions of survivors and receive an appropriate reply from a selection of more than a thousand pre-recorded answers.
/ Wednesday, September 23, 2020
The story of Sara and Asa Shapiro is one of shared tragedy and shared success. Both were born in the small pre-war, predominantly Jewish town of Korets, in what was then Poland and is now Ukraine, into large Jewish families. Both survived the Holocaust. Sara escaped the ghetto and pretended to be a Ukrainian orphan while working as a maid. Asa was in a Russian Labor Camp in Siberia and then was subscripted into the Russian Army. They married, moved to America with practically nothing, settled in Detroit, and built a large family and a thriving business.
/ Wednesday, September 23, 2020
“This effort is especially important now when the world is experiencing a rise of violent antisemitism,” says Ilia Salita, CEO of Genesis Philanthropy Group. “We believe that Dimensions in Testimony will help counteract this and, more broadly, to disseminate knowledge about the tragedy of Soviet Jewry during the Shoah and the heroism of Jews who fought against the Nazis.”
/ Wednesday, September 23, 2020
“I remember President Bill Clinton speaking at our 10th anniversary gala about his regret that the Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda happened on his watch,” Liberman said. “A genocide was in the making, and I did not want this to be on our watch. The Institute immediately sent a team to record the survivors' testimonies to ensure the world heard directly from the Rohingya before it was too late.”
/ Wednesday, September 23, 2020
Barry Sternlicht’s father Maurycy was only nine years old when he fled Poland in 1938. Maurycy survived the war by hiding with Czech partisans. He related his story in the testimony he gave to USC Shoah Foundation in 1998. Sternlicht never heard his father’s story until later in life. But his father’s resilience in the face of war, his success but later the displacement he faced with business setbacks in America, inspired Sternlicht to achieve his own success as a founder of the Starwood Capital Group.
/ Wednesday, September 23, 2020
Suzi Weiss-Fischmann’s commitment to testimony-based education comes from her roots. The co-founder of OPI Products, Weiss-Fischmann was born in Hungary, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor who endured the horrors of Auschwitz. Her mother’s experiences and her own early life in Hungary reinforced the importance of education as a way of countering hatred. It’s a major reason why she has supported the Institute for more than a decade, and why she recently joined the Institute’s Board of Councilors.
/ Wednesday, September 23, 2020
USC Shoah Foundation has partnered with JewishGen.org, an affiliate of the Museum of Jewish Heritage - A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, to integrate an index of data from nearly 50,000 Jewish Holocaust survivor testimonies found in the Visual History Archive® into the JewishGen Holocaust database.  
JewishGen, genealogy / Wednesday, September 23, 2020
On Indigenous Peoples' Day, three members of the organizing committee will discuss goals and plans for the international conference “Mass Violence and Its Lasting Impact on Indigenous Peoples - The Case of the Americas and Australia/Pacific Region.”
cagr / Friday, September 25, 2020
While she grew up Catholic, Ceci Chan became dedicated to the Jewish concept of tikkun olam, or “repairing the world” over 20 years ago. The concept also manifests itself in the Chinese phrase that translates to “one united world,” 世界大同, which was a concept representing the highest level of the ideal social system, an equal, classless, borderless and stateless world. The concept comes from Confucius recorded in the "Book of Rites • Li Yun".
/ Friday, September 25, 2020
In 1969, Professor Richard Hovanissian started requiring students in his UCLA seminar course to record and transcribe interviews with survivors of the Armenian Genocide. Over the course of the next 50 years, his students assembled a massive library of more than 1,000 interviews, a universe of experiences that is one of the largest collections of Armenian testimonies in the world. This year, Hovanissian donated the collection to the USC Shoah Foundation, joining the testimonies in his collection to the hundreds collected by Dr. Michael Hagopian of the Armenian Film Foundation.
/ Friday, September 25, 2020
At the age of 16, Cole Kawana traveled to Rwanda for an investigative journalism trip to learn more about the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi. While there, he made a short film, The Kindness of Strangers. The film outlines the massacre of nearly a million people over 100 days — almost a sixth of the nation’s population at the time — and also chronicled how he helped survivors by donating filters to ensure drinkable water. This led to his founding of the Clean Water Ambassadors Foundation, which donates water filters to communities in need.
/ Friday, September 25, 2020
Marilyn Sinclair will never forget the day her father gave his testimony to USC Shoah Foundation. “It was the first time we came together as a family to discuss my father being a Holocaust survivor,” she recalls. “When he passed away in 2010, I realized the days of having actual witnesses to provide live testimony were numbered.”
/ Friday, September 25, 2020
Naomi Azrieli understands the power of the written word that enables survivors’ memories to live on and be shared. As head of the Azrieli Foundation, she oversees both its philanthropy and the publication of survivors’ memoirs in illustrated volumes made free to the public.
/ Friday, September 25, 2020
As the grandchild of four Holocaust survivors, Shael Rosenbaum, feels a duty to keep history’s flame from dimming so that the lessons of the past can remain alive and vibrant for the future. In addition to chairing the Sarah and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre in Canada, he also served on USC Shoah Foundation’s Next Generation Council (NGC).
/ Friday, September 25, 2020
Tammy Anderson was first drawn to USC Shoah Foundation by her accounting firm partners Gerald Breslauer and Michael Rutman, who served on the Institute’s first board. Anderson’s involvement began with providing accounting services and blossomed into membership in the Next Generation Council (NGC).
/ Friday, September 25, 2020
Trudy Elbaum Gottesman keeps her family tree in her purse, close to her at all times, so she will always remember the names of relatives who were murdered in the Holocaust.
/ Friday, September 25, 2020
Board of Councilors member William P. Lauder has been part of USC Shoah Foundation from its very beginning, when founder Steven Spielberg asked him to support a collection of interviews with Holocaust survivors. “We met on the Amblin backlot, in a conference room with a whiteboard that had upcoming movie ideas on it,” Lauder recalls. Over the next two decades, those interviews grew into the Visual History Archive, and Lauder has steadfastly backed the Institute ever since.
/ Friday, September 25, 2020

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