360-degree testimonies on location use the latest technology with a single camera that is able to capture the interviewee and the surrounding location in a single shot. This allows viewers to feel like they are standing in the location with the survivor. The locations might include a childhood home, a ghetto, a concentration camp, inside a museum or other places of key significance to a survivor’s personal history.

Join Rachael Cerrotti, Storyteller in Residence at USC Shoah Foundation as well as an award-winning photographer, writer, educator, and audio producer, for a special segment in The Ghetto Fighters' House international online lecture series "Talking Memory."

USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of Fritzie Fritzshall, president of the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center, whose story of survival and will to share it has inspired thousands of people. She was 91. Always hopeful and optimistic, Fritzie’s understanding of where hate and intolerance can lead if left unchecked has driven her her whole life to educate and empower everyone she meets. She will be dearly missed.

This documentary chronicles the Holocaust as experienced in Italy, from the racial laws Mussolini enacted in 1938 through the German invasion in 1943 and the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945. The experiences are made personal through the use of testimony from the archive of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education. Nine Italian citizens, all survivors of Auschwitz, share their stories; their testimonies are woven among personal and historical photographs and additional archival footage.

An online lecture by Lauren Cantillon (PhD candidate in the Department of Culture, Media & Creative Industries at King’s College London, UK) 2020-2021 Robert J. Katz Research Fellow in Genocide Studies Organized by the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research Cosponsored by the USC Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies

In 1985, when Dr. Sharon Aroian-Poiser was a graduate student, she accompanied her grandfather to Washington D.C., to a conference commemorating the 70th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. Between 1915 and 1918, the Turkish government systematically expelled or massacred an estimated 1.5 million Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire. Aroian-Poiser watched as elderly survivors at the conference rose to tell their stories before microphones and video recorders, many of them for the first time. It was, in fact, the first time that Aroian-Poiser learned that her grandfather was a survivor.

Liberation75's Student Education Days are running from April 7-8, 2021, beginning at 6am PST on April 7! Liberation75 has brought together over 15 of the world's leading Holocaust education organizations, including USC Shoah Foundation, to teach your students the important lessons of the Holocaust.

Presented by The Miller Center for Community Protection & Resilience, Rutgers University, International March of the Living and Maimonides Institute for Medicine, Ethics and the Holocaust, in cooperation with USC Shoah Foundation.

It was 83 years ago this week that 13-year-old Lisa Jura boarded a Kindertransport train from Vienna to London, the first step in a journey that would be memorably depicted by her daughter Mona Golabek in the acclaimed The Children of Willesden Lane books. A series of rescue efforts organized by Sir Nicholas Winton, the Kindertransport helped nearly 10,000 Jewish children escape from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia to safety in the United Kingdom.

“Challenging the Shame Paradigm: Jewish Women’s Narratives of Sexual(ized) Violence During the Holocaust” Lauren Cantillon (PhD candidate in the Department of Culture, Media & Creative Industries at King’s College London, UK) 2020-2021 Robert J. Katz Research Fellow in Genocide Studies March 25, 2021

In this lecture, Alan Rosen considers the special manner of witness found in Holocaust-era calendars composed in ghettos, in camps, and in hiding. The marking of fast days and festivals tell a remarkable story; the form, organization, and languages of the calendars convey a related one. And as with testimony in general, what is omitted—a date or a month, a name or a script—speaks volumes. At times, moreover, such calendars served as vehicles for sacred writings, images and symbols as well as for camouflaged defiance. The lecture is based on his recent book The Holocaust’s Jewish Calendars: Keeping Time Sacred, Making Time Holy.

USC Shoah Foundation and The Conscious Kid are partnering to develop and implement a series of grade K-5 resources and education initiatives to counter antisemitism and raise awareness to appreciate cultural, ethnic and religious diversity. The Conscious Kid was founded in 2016 by Katie Ishizuka and Ramon Stephens, both parents of color who found a lack of diverse representation in children’s literature at their local library when looking for reading material for their young sons.

In February 2012 Holocaust survivor Pinchas Gutter sat down inside a light stage surrounded by 50 cameras and 6,000 LED bulbs to give his testimony to the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive. Gutter’s interview was the first proof of concept of Dimensions in Testimony (DiT), a groundbreaking new technology that enables viewers to pose questions to survivors like Gutter and hear their responses in real-time, lifelike conversation.

Two USC scholars – graduate student Nicholas Bredie and undergraduate student Atharva Tewari – will share the Beth and Arthur Lev Student Research Fellowship for Summer 2021.

The Institute congratulates Lesley Stahl and her 60 Minutes team for winning a 2021 Gracie Award for their segment “Talking to the Past,” which focused on Dimensions in Testimony and featured live as well as virtual interviews with Holocaust survivors, including Pinchas Gutter, Eva Kor, Aaron Elster and Max Eisen.

The Institute mourns the passing of members of our community in 2021, including survivors who have given testimony Julio Botton, Fritzie Fritzshall, Eddie Jaku, Roman Kent, Rabbi Bent Melchior, Ruth Pearl, Suzy Ressler, Irving Roth, and Marcus Segal.

Betty Grebenschikoff and Ana María Wahrenberg were inseparable best friends before the Holocaust. Separated when their families each fled the Nazis, they each believed the other had perished. They were reunited just a few short months ago thanks to a combination of international partnerships, astute research, and the power of survivor testimony.

11:30 am PST/2:30 pm EST/6:30 am AEDT (+1) The film will be available to stream for a fee of $12 between Jan. 25-28.  Live Virtual Conversation event is free and features:  Zuzanna Surowy, Lead Actress  Steven Oritt, Director/Producer Mickey Shapiro, Executive Producer, USC Shoah  Foundation Board of Councilors Exec. Committee Member Moderated by Stephen D. Smith, Co-Producer and Finci-Viterbi Executive Director, USC Shoah Foundation 

Join Dr. Ruth Westheimer in conversation with Rabbi Peter J. Rubinstein after a screening of her animated short film "Ruth: A Little Girl's Big Journey," told in her own voice as she recounts how she survived the Holocaust as a young girl.

In this program, Stephen D. Smith, the Finci Viterbi Executive Director of USC Shoah Foundation, and Mary Pat Higgins, President, and CEO of the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum, will discuss the cutting-edge new technologies in storytelling and virtual reality and how they are being implemented in the museum space.

USC Shoah Foundation is looking for 40 students across the country in 7th– 11th grades representative of diverse backgrounds and academic skills who are interested in participating in its highly competitive William P. Lauder Junior Internship Program. The program provides a dynamic and unique learning opportunity to engage with testimonies – personal stories – from survivors and witnesses of genocide to develop their own voice.

As the Covid 19 pandemic requires educators to provide their students with new and unprecedented levels of social emotional support, The Willesden Project, a partnership of USC Shoah Foundation and Hold On To Your Music, is inviting teachers to a special webinar to learn strategies and engage with experts for using music and testimony as sources of healing in the classroom.

“Speaking About Sexuality: Male Jewish Intimacy and Agency in Oral History Interviews” Florian Zabransky (PhD candidate at the Weidenfeld Institute–Centre for German-Jewish Studies at University of Sussex, UK) 2020-2021 Margee and Douglas Greenberg Research Fellow April 6, 2021

When the Coronavirus pandemic banished students and teachers from classrooms in March 2020, Liza Manoyan scrambled to shift to distance learning. Figuring out the technology was one thing. But she faced another challenge. “There are not a lot of digital resources for teaching in Armenian,” she said.

The coup in Myanmar earlier this week, ending the country's experiment with limited democracy, brought to power military and police implicated in carrying out genocide against the Rohingya people in 2017.    This troubling development could result in further consequences for the Rohingya and other ethnic minorities in Myanmar. More than 600,000 people remain at risk—perhaps now even more than ever.    

Holocaust Survivor Judah Samet first gave testimony to USC Shoah Foundation in 1997. In 2019, as part of the CATT testimony collection, he spoke to us again. This time Judah wasn’t talking about his experiences in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.

It was really just a coincidence that in her efforts to reduce racism, hatred, and violence, some of Ceci Chan’s earliest work with USC Shoah Foundation involved the Nanjing Massacre. Chan, a strategic investor and philanthropist, had been funding projects around Holocaust education for 13 years when she met USC Shoah Foundation Finci-Viterbi Executive Director Stephen Smith at a Shabbat dinner while both were attending the USC Global Conference in Hong Kong in the fall of 2011.

A group of 30 second-grade children in New York City took part in a Tour for Tolerance event earlier this month that featured a virtual read-along given by famed broadcaster and Holocaust survivor Dr. Ruth Westheimer. Delivered virtually to students at the Glenn Morris School (PS100) in Queens, New York, the program was a pilot initiative of Tour for Tolerance and USC Shoah Foundation.

A cohort of forty-one new students and five returning Junior Intern Emissaries convened virtually on November 14 for the first session of the 2021-2022 William P. Lauder Junior Internship Program. The highly selective program provides a dynamic and unique learning opportunity for students in 7th–11th grades to engage with testimonies–personal stories–from survivors and witnesses of genocide to develop their own voice, learn to recognize the patterns and impact of hate, and gain work experience and academic and digital skills.

On August 2, 1944, nearly 3,000 Roma and Sinti women, men and children were murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau.