William recalls the joyful celebration of Simhat Torah-the holiday marking the completion of weekly Torah readings- with Rabbi Teitelbaum, the Satmar Rebbe, holding a Sefer Torah (Torah scroll) - in the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp. The celebration took place even though the barrack was surrounded by German soldiers.
Secondary school students across France are hard at work on their entries for the 2013-2014 National Contest on Resistance and Deportation – and many of them are drawing inspiration from USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive
French educators are attending a Teaching with Testimony in the 21st Century workshop today and tomorrow to learn about IWitness and using testimony in the classroom.
Jan Karskiwas recognized as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem for risking his life in order to alert the world about the Holocaust. He remembers meeting award-winning French documentarian Claude Lanzmann, who interviewed Karski for his film Shoah, a nine and a half-hour documentary about the Holocaust.
Growing up, it wasn’t terribly unusual to see people in our house with telltale tattoos on their arms.
We kids somehow knew what those blurry inked numbers meant, but we also knew it wasn’t polite to ask about them. And so, I never did. And honestly, no one in my family had been so marked — the people with tattoos were mostly friends of my grandparents — so it wasn’t something I had a lot of interest in hearing about. And perhaps in an effort to protect our innocence, family elders showed no interest in talking about it.
Rabbi Jungreis remembers the ritual circumcision, Brit Milah, performed on a baby eight days after his birth in front of the Holy Ark at the synagogue in the Szeged ghetto. Jacob relates that rather than a joyous occasion, it became a sad one in which the quorum of ten Jewish men—a Minyan—cried bitterly and pronounced that “now his fate is sealed.” The baby, however, survived the war and later became a Hasidic Rabbi in Williamsburg, New York.
Alice Craig recalls her family’s deportation to Auschwitz. She remembers how her father prepared for the deportation by burying important family documents and how he knew that they wouldn’t be returning.
Aegis Trust Rwanda, The Institute of Research and Dialogue for Peace, Radio La Benevolencija and USC Shoah Foundation - the Institute for Visual History and Education are joining forces to launch a peace-building and education program in Rwanda.
USC Shoah Foundation associate director of research Dan Leshem and former Institute Fellow Jeffrey Shandler will lead a seminar about video interviews of Holocaust survivors at the Association for Jewish Scholars (AJS) conference next week.