Two USC scholars – graduate students Emily Geminder and Vaclav Masek - will share the Beth and Arthur Lev Student Research Fellowship for Summer 2022.

USC Shoah Foundation is bringing The Willesden Project educational initiative to a group of 500 Ukrainian refugees and other guests in Warsaw, Poland this weekend. The event will also feature a musical performance by USC Shoah Foundation partner and celebrated pianist Mona Golabek.

USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of Edward Mosberg, a Holocaust survivor whose passion for sharing his story through lectures, recorded interviews, and educational trips back to concentration camps in Europe taught and inspired people everywhere. He was 96.

Fifteen hours of interviews describing the actions of a group of World War II-era diplomats who defied official policies to save tens of thousands of lives during the Holocaust have been added to USC Shoah Foundation’s 55,000-strong Visual History Archive (VHA) thanks to a collaboration with the Andrew J. & Joyce D. Mandell Family Foundation.

Join USC Shoah Foundation and The Leichtag Foundation for a dialogue between film producers and scholars, Konstantin Fam, Clint Burkett, Alan Markowitz, Kori Street and Jacqueline S. Gmach

"It’s very important that the Swedish Holocaust Museum is one of Sweden’s National Historical Museums. We believe the Holocaust is not a Jewish concern, but that it is, and must be, a universal one." Lizzie Oved Scheja (pictured above, full interview below), founder and director of J! Jewish Culture in Sweden, speaking earlier this month after Swedish Minister of Culture Jeanette Gustafsdotter inaugurated the country’s first museum dedicated to preserving and perpetuating the memory of the Holocaust.

USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of our friend Vera Gissing, who died March 12 in Berkshire, England at age 93. Vera will be remembered for her extraordinary life, which included escaping Prague in 1939 on one of the last Kindertransport trains to make it out of Czechoslovakia before the outbreak of World War II.

Holocaust survivor and USC Shoah Foundation friend Max Eisen passed away earlier this month, leaving a unique legacy forged by harrowing wartime experiences, 20 return trips to Auschwitz-Birkenau as an educator, and the testimony he gave against two SS guards in Germany beginning in 2015.

The Institute mourns the passing of members of our community in 2022, including survivors who have given testimony, Joe Adamson, Helen Fagin, Sigmund Burke, Vera Gissing, Gerda Weissmann Klein, Bill Harvey, Max Glauben, Max Eisen, Phillip Maisel, Edward Mosberg, Judah Samet and Robert Clary.

Today is International Women’s Day and this year we are honoring girls—from Holocaust Europe to Africa, from Central America to the Middle East, from occupied China to pre-war Armenia—who demonstrated extraordinary strength and resilience in the face of unimaginable horrors. Here is a selection of USC Shoah Foundation clips and films to mark the occasion.

USC Shoah Foundation today launches a series of professional development webinars that provide educators with testimony-based resources that support accelerated learning practices across the curriculum. The focus on accelerated learning comes as schools return to in-person instruction and teachers navigate the range of learning losses caused by the need for remote schooling during the Covid-19 pandemic.

July 11 marks 26 years since the Srebrenica genocide, the biggest in a cluster of massacres that occurred as part of the campaign of ethnic cleansing in eastern parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina during the 1992-1995 war in the country. It’s the day in 1995 that Bosnian Serb forces led by General Ratko Mladic overran the enclave of Srebrenica, the town in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina the United Nations had formally designated as a “safe area” in 1993. 

Eva (Geiringer) Schloss was 15 on January 27, 1945, the day the Soviet army first entered Auschwitz. But, she says, as the war raged on and uncertainty persisted, survival was a struggle even after liberation. Read about and view behind-the-scenes photos of Eva’s interactive biography for Dimensions in Testimony, an interview  that took more than 100 hours to capture with 3D technology.

How best to fuse compelling testimony with the latest innovative technologies to produce the most effective instructional materials for students and educators around the world?

Eighty-one years ago today Nazi soldiers and their collaborators committed one of the largest single massacres of the Holocaust with the murder of close to 33,000 Jews in the Babyn Yar ravine in Ukraine. The site of the atrocity on the outskirts of the capital Kyiv is now a memorial that people anywhere can visit with a new Virtual IWalk released by USC Shoah Foundation earlier this year. 

Join acclaimed pianist and author Mona Golabek for a 50-minute livestreamed performance adapted from her best-selling book, The Children of Willesden Lane. This special theatrical and musical Willesden READS event gives New England students and educators the opportunity to interact with Mona as she brings to life the inspiring story of her mother, Lisa Jura, a young Holocaust survivor who in 1938 escaped from Vienna to London on the Kindertransport. More than one million students around the world have experienced the Willesden READS program to date.

USC Shoah Foundation with its partner the Schindler’s Ark Foundation has added a tour of Oskar Schindler’s former factory in what is now the Czech Republic to its mobile IWalk application, enabling smartphone users to explore the site where the German businessman sheltered more than 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust.

Join Temple Israel of Hollywood, USC Shoah Foundation, and Chevalier Books for a special event with artist-in-residence and author Rachael Cerrotti about her critically-acclaimed memoir “We Share the Same Sky” based on her award-winning podcast.

Leadership Workshop - Action and Values, presented by USC Shoah Foundation's William P. Lauder Junior Internship Program, provides a dynamic and unique opportunity for students to engage with testimonies – personal stories – from survivors and witnesses of genocide to develop a stronger sense of self and voice.

USC Shoah Foundation is saddened to learn about the passing of Max Glauben, a child survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, the Majdanek and Dachau concentration camps, and a veteran of the United States Army. In 2018, Max was interviewed by USC Shoah Foundation, in association with the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum—a center he helped found—for the interactive Dimensions in Testimony exhibit. He recorded his original video testimony for USC Shoah Foundation in Dallas, Texas in 1996.

As a novelist, I am fascinated by decisions. Choice, real or imagined, is what separates tragedy from mythology. Decisions, always made with incomplete understanding, shape the arc of lives and narrative.

When Zuzanna Surowy needed to make herself cry as the lead actress in the Holocaust-era feature film My Name Is Sara, she followed the advice of her co-star to “put a demon inside of her” – to imagine something so tragic it would bring tears to her eyes. It was much harder for Surowy, then 15, to follow the second half of that directive: to leave the demon on the set.

The 2021-2022 William P. Lauder Junior Interns program wrapped up last month with special guest Jewish Holocaust survivor Dr. Elena Nightingale calling on participants to speak up when confronted by discrimination and injustice. “Young people's voices are listened to [and] have more power than you think. Don’t be a bystander,” the physician and human rights activist told the interns at the final session of the 10-week program. “Make your voices heard.”

For the first time in two years, USC Shoah Foundation welcomed students to its international headquarters at USC for the fifth annual Leadership Workshop-Action and Values.  Eighteen rising ninth to 12th-grade students, selected from across the country, participated in the July 10 to 15 seminars, field trips, discussions, and group projects while based in USC dorms. 

Emiliia Kessler grew up in Khmel'nik, then part of Soviet Ukraine. She recalls the complex tensions between the Russians, the Ukrainians and the Jewish community that were part of everyday life in the 1930s. Related With Ukraine under attack, we stand by our programmatic partners in Ukraine and Russia working to  build more tolerant communities.

Alex Redner was 11 years old when the German army began bombarding his hometown of Lviv (then Lwow) on Sept. 1, 1939. Less than three weeks later, the Red Army occupied the city. Related With Ukraine under attack, we stand by our programmatic partners in Ukraine and Russia working to  build more tolerant communities.

Aspen Film in partnership with USC Shoah Foundation is proud to present a special family event featuring two short films: The Tattooed Torah and Ruth: A Little Girl's Big Journey. Free to the public.

Two Holocaust survivors and friends of USC Shoah Foundation, Max Eisen and Dr. Agnes Kaposi, have been recognized by Queen Elizabeth II for their work in Holocaust education. Eisen was appointed to the Order of Canada for his “contributions to Holocaust education, and his promotion of transformational dialogue on human rights, tolerance and respect.”

USC Shoah Foundation is now accepting applications for rising 8th–12th grade students across the country to participate in its highly competitive week-long summer program, Leadership Workshop – Action and Values.

"During the Holocaust I was living in a cocoon, with blinders. I lived completely in the present moment, because at any second, any Nazi, any German, any Kapo, could do away with me. You were like a gnat that they could squash. So, you lived inside a cocoon and hoped that one the day the butterfly would come out."