USC Shoah Foundation partner and celebrated pianist Mona Golabek is scheduled to bring her livestreamed theatrical performance and concert to students and educators in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut at two signature events later this month.

Fifteen hours of interviews related to a group of World War II-era diplomats who defied official policies to save hundreds of thousands of people from the Holocaust are to be integrated into the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive.

Another year dominated by the ongoing pandemic draws to a close. From producing animated films to conducting interviews, forging new partnerships and sharing incredible testimonies, 2021 was a year to remember. Here are some of the highlights of the work the Institute has accomplished.

Phil Scheinman didn’t know he had close relatives who survived the Holocaust until he saw the testimony of André Scheinmann, a cousin he calls the “Jewish James Bond”. Phil created a movie that brought together 400 family members — many of them newly discovered — to learn how André ran a network of 300 agents for the French Resistance and, even after he was sent to concentration camp, helped save dozens of lives.

A sizzle reel in support of our virtual event Judy Batalion: The Jewish "Ghetto Girls" Who Fought the Nazis where Judy Batalion discusses her book The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos.

In partnership with Aspen Film, the event series opens with a screening and special panel discussion of the award-winning feature film My Name Is Sara. The film is based on the true story of 13-year-old Sara Góralnik, who, after escaping a Jewish Ghetto in Poland and losing her family at the outset of the Holocaust, hides in plain sight, passing as an Orthodox Christian, and ultimately survives against all odds.

In this talk, Lauren Cantillon explores the tensions and textures of emotions present in Jewish women’s personal memory narratives of sexual(ized) violence during the Holocaust. Drawing on interviews from the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, she highlights some of the numerous Jewish women who shared their stories within the context of a Holocaust testimony interview.

USC Shoah Foundation has added 132 testimonies to its Visual History Archive. These firsthand accounts of mass atrocities spanning more than 100 years are now available to researchers, educators, family members, and the public.

As a girl in Budapest, Olga Menczer always looked forward to the fourth night of Hanukkah—when she finally got her turn to light the family menorah. Olga recorded her story of survival with us in 1998 and continued to educate her community in New Jersey for many years. We join Olga in wishing all who are sharing in the light a happy fourth candle.

Looking for an opportunity to make a difference in the world? Join the team at USC Shoah Foundation. Our mission is to give opportunity to survivors and witnesses to the Shoah—the genocide of the Jews—to tell their own stories in their own words in audio-visual interviews, preserve their testimonies, and make them accessible for research, education, and outreach for the betterment of humankind in perpetuity.

The Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage, in partnership with USC Shoah Foundation, proudly presents The Children of Willesden Lane, the critically acclaimed one-woman theatrical performance by concert pianist Mona Golabek.

The Academy Award®-winning feature documentary film shares the remarkable stories of five people ­– a grandmother, a teacher, a businessman, an artist, and a U.S. congressman – as they return from the United States to their hometowns and to the ghettos and concentration camps that once imprisoned them. The film is currently available on Netflix and Blu-ray.

Rukesha’s testimony, along with six other interviews from The 600 documentary, was recently integrated into USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, which now holds 135 indexed and searchable interviews connected to the Genocide Against the Tutsi Rwanda. The majority of these testimonies were collected by Aegis Trust and the Kigali Genocide Memorial, in partnership with USC Shoah Foundation. The seven new testimonies include the first accounts of Rwandan liberators to be added to the collection.

On Monday I received a voicemail from Suzan Trevor that her father Marcus Segal had passed away. I had only just met Marcus, albeit virtually, weeks before when he shared his testimony with USC Shoah Foundation on January 26th. While saddened by the news of his passing, I’m filled with immense gratitude for having had the opportunity to hear his incredible life’s story in the final weeks of his life. 

“Continuing” does not begin to characterize the work that was accomplished in the past year — we crushed it by any measure.

Produced by USC Shoah Foundation, the award-winning Two Sides of Survival brings together stories from the East and West, chronicling how Jews who fled the Nazis in Europe, and Chinese who were threatened by Japanese occupation, improbably found refuge close to one another in the 1930’s and during World War II. Buy ticket (Use discount code "Shoah Foundation" at checkout)

A four-year initiative to bring together the expertise of USC Shoah Foundation and the Azrieli Foundation—Canada’s leading nationwide Holocaust education program—has culminated with the release of a robust new destination for teachers and students with a variety of bilingual educational materials based on the memoirs and testimonies of Canadian Holocaust survivors.

The short-animated film, The Tattooed Torah brings to life the true story of the rescue and restoration of a small Torah from Brno, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic) The film provides students an opportunity to reflect on fundamental themes of family, hope, resilience, and cultural traditions appropriate for the K-5 audience. In this webinar, educators will learn effective strategies for primary level students on how to integrate The Tattooed Torah and supporting testimony-based resources, now available on IWitness.

Twenty-one-years after my grandmother recorded her testimony with USC Shoah Foundation, I teamed up with the Institute to create a podcast about my own decade-long journey to retrace her war story. It would be the first-ever narrative podcast to be based around survivor testimony. After years of research, criss-crossing international borders, living in stranger’s homes, and harmonizing history with the politics of today, I began to sit with her voice. “I always felt very guilty,” she told the interviewer about her survival.

Join Finci-Viterbi Executive Director Dr. Stephen Smith in a conversation with psychologist, author, writer and Holocaust survivor Dr. Ruth Westheimer

There is gratitude deep inside of grief. A feeling of, how lucky was I to have this friendship at all. That’s how I feel about my dear Rabbi Bent Melchior who passed away in Copenhagen on July 28, 2021. He was 92-years-old.

Hela Goldstein’s testimony given to the British Film and Photographic Unit on April 24, 1945 is believed to be the first-ever audio-visual testimony given by a Holocaust survivor. As a 22-year old victim, she spoke from Bergen-Belsen, the Nazi concentration camp where she was imprisoned upon liberation. Standing at the foot of a mass grave with her killers before her, Hela recounted what she experienced. By telling her story in the face of death, she became a foremother of testimony.

Yad Vashem has collected approximately 4.8 million pages of testimony that restore the personal identities and record the brief life stories of the six million Jews who perished at the hands of the Nazis. In honor of Yom HaShoah—Israel’s Day of Holocaust Remembrance—this webinar, led by a Yad Vashem educator, will highlight survivor testimony from Echoes & Reflections, and pages of testimony from Yad Vashem’s archive, to examine the importance of memory and how it serves us and future generations, to create a better world. This webinar is open to teachers and their students.

USC Shoah Foundation’s Dimensions in Testimony enables people to ask questions that prompt real-time responses from pre-recorded video interviews with Holocaust survivors and other witnesses to genocide. This innovative project integrates advanced filming techniques, specialized display technologies, and next generation natural language processing to create an interactive biography that humanizes the individual story. Pairing Dimensions in Testimony with Echoes & Reflections helps educators pair historical context and effective pedagogical principles with this new and impactful technology. During this webinar, teachers will discover the variety of ways that they can meet and interact with Holocaust survivor, Pinchas Gutter.

Today, October 1st, marks the day in 1990 that Rwandan Patriotic Front troops crossed into Rwanda from neighboring Uganda and the beginning of a sequence of events that culminated in the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi that claimed as many as one million lives over the course of approximately 100 days.

Dances of the Holocaust, the We Are THE TREE OF LIFE program that was originally scheduled for May 25, has officially been rescheduled for Wednesday, June 23 at 11:00 am PT.

USC Shoah Foundation today launches its 2021-2022 Back to School package, a suite of testimony-based resources on IWitness to help educators navigate the complex issues created by the Covid-19 pandemic and surfaced by the recent upsurge in social movements demanding racial justice. This year’s classroom activities and educator professional development modules are based on testimony from the Visual History Archive that help students to critically evaluate historical context, consider various perspectives and impacts, and reflect on personal connections.

The Willesden Project, a partnership program of USC Shoah Foundation and Hold On To Your Music, today announced a new collaboration with the National Center for Families Learning (NCFL) to promote literacy and education through a variety of programs and activities over this school year.

USC Shoah Foundation and Discovery Education have announced the winners of the United Kingdom category of the 2021 international Stronger Than Hate Challenge First prize in the challenge was awarded to Elizabeth Stickland, a Year 8 (US 7th grade) student from Attleborough Academy who wrote a powerful poem about how communities can overcome prejudice. Elizabeth’s top prize is a £5,000 ($6,700) grant for her school and an iPad.

Join Sedda Antekelian, Educator and Outreach Specialist at USC Shoah Foundation, and filmmaker and broadcaster Carla Garapedian for this webinar as they explore the legacy of the Armenian Genocide.