After nearly three years of the IWitness in Rwanda program, IWitness will debut new activities created by some of the teachers who participated in the program.

Today IWitness launched its entire suite of new content and features to coincide with the new school year, including 13 new multimedia activities on a variety of languages and topics.

The foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” (German acronym EVZ) is hosting an international workshop on the use of Holocaust survivor testimonies in education January 9-11.

One would think that the grandson of four Polish Holocaust survivors would have an in-depth knowledge of the Shoah, but it was quite the contrary. The Holocaust was a topic that was never discussed when I was growing up. When it was introduced, it was in the most unconventional way, through satire film and television. I knew this was just a facade draped over the painful truth.

The new program includes a toolkit on IWitness and an diversity summit in winter 2017.

Five members of the educational nonprofit started working with USC Shoah Foundation education staff last week to develop resources in IWitness for Panamanian students and teachers.

The more than 1,000 interviews will constitute the largest non-Holocaust-related collection to be integrated into the Institute’s Visual History Archive. It will also be the Archive’s first audio-only collection.

The USC Shoah Foundation is looking for students in 7th– 12th grades who are interested in participating in its highly competitive William P. Lauder Junior Internship Program. The program provides a dynamic and unique learning opportunity for students to engage with testimonies – personal stories – from survivors and witnesses of genocide.

  Call for Papers: The Future of Holocaust Testimonies V: An International Conference and Workshop March 11-13, 2019  The Holocaust Studies Program of Western Galilee College, the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, University of Southern California, and the Center for Judaic, Holocaust and Peace Studies, Appalachian State University, announce the fifth international interdisciplinary conference and workshop on The Future of Holocaust Testimonies to be held on 11–13 March 2019 in Akko, Israel.  

Steven Spielberg, founder of USC Shoah Foundation and director and co-producer of the film, says there has never been a more important time for students to see the historical period drama. “Hate is less parenthetical today, and it’s more a headline," he told Lester Holt of NBC Nightly News in an interview about the rerelease.

Their loved ones – including women and children – were slaughtered by the military and tossed into mass graves. For more than 30 years, survivors of the Guatemalan Genocide against the indigenous population assumed nobody cared about their stories. After all, nobody had ever bothered to ask.

This summer, USC Shoah Foundation education team hosted their annual Leadership Workshop—Action and Values presented by the William P. Lauder Junior Internship Program. The workshop calls for applicants who are preparing themselves to be in leadership positions in their communities. The focus is to cultivate, through the power of testimony, the confidence and courage to be an upstander. Testimonies, with their powerful universal messages, instill in students the importance of personal stories, values, and agency.

USC Shoah Foundation is sorry to learn of the passing of Aleksander Laks, the first Holocaust survivor to give his testimony to USC Shoah Foundation in Brazil and a special friend of the Institute. Laks passed away July 21 at age 88. Laks survived the Lodz Ghetto, Auschwitz and a death march as a teenager. He immigrated to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and became a leader of the survivor community there as president of the Sherit Hapleita (Holocaust survivors’ organization).

USC Shoah Foundation worked closely with The Survivor team to bring the important film to the screen and received a production credit. Assistance included providing access to Haft’s and other survivors’ testimonies in the Visual History Archive, and consulting with the producers to ensure historical accuracy. Crispin Brooks is curator of the Visual History Archive and over the years has played a key role in archiving its testimonies. He is also immersed in Eastern European studies. He spoke to us about consulting on The Survivor.

March 8 Roundtable at USC Highlights Women’s Responses to Mass ViolenceIn honor of  International Women’s Day on 8 March 2012, the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation Institute is partnering with The Holocaust and the United Nations Outreach Programme to hold a roundtable discussion, “Strength Through Adversity: Women and Mass Violence”, in Los Angeles.

Holocaust education advocate Rhonda Fink-Whitman interviews a dozen Pennsylvania college students about the Holocaust. Their answers show what happens when states do not make Holocaust education mandatory.

Sid Shachnow has two Silver Stars, three Bronze Stars and two Purple Hearts -- and that's just for his service in Vietnam, where he led his troops with courage and distinction. “There was no room for conscience,” he confides when discussing his 39 years of military service. “Once I was face to face with a Viet Cong. I had him in my sights as he ran toward me. He dropped his weapon and veered left. I did not pull the trigger. I still do not know if I did the right thing. My conscience got in the way.”

Students, faculty, staff, and the public will have access.

Following a screening of Finding Hillywood, a documentary about the birth of the Rwandan film industry, Rwandan film pioneer Eric Kabera spoke about making movies 20 years after the genocide in a Q&A hosted by the USC Shoah Foundation.

Contest challenges students to honor the legacy of Schindler’s List by engaging in community service inspired by survivors’ testimonies and showcasing their action in an IWitness video essay.

Pinchas Gutter stepped onto the bimah at the Kiever Synagogue in Toronto, Canada, where for the 27th consecutive time he was about to lead the Yom Kippur services.  He stood tall in his white robe breathing deeply surrounded by eight white-clad Torah scrolls, each held by a leaders of the congregation.  The scrolls appear to jostle for position, their silver shields and finials glistening as PInchas intones the ancient supplication, 'Kol Nidrei'.  But on the bimah there are more than the eight men holding Torah scrolls, because gathered around him are also the ghosts of the Gerrer Hasidim o

Leading American and international businessmen and philanthropists are joining forces to support the commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau on 27 January 2015.

Johanna Söderholm has been in high demand since she returned from Auschwitz: The Past is Present.

Auschwitz: The Past is Present has left Australian teacher Christine Cole with a new motto and new motivation for imparting the lessons of the Holocaust on her students.

I first met Sir Nicholas Winton when he had reached the mere age of 87.  He was curious to learn about the UK Holocaust Centre, which our family had opened in Nottinghamshire.  Winton was intrigued to learn that a non-Jewish family established the center, which resonated with his own ethics, as a Holocaust rescuer who saved 669 Jewish children by organizing the Czechoslovakian Kindertransport.

The young Nazi approached 13-year-old Szulem Czygielmamn as he walked on the sidewalk of Lubartowska Street in Lublin, Poland, and shoved him off the sidewalk. Szulem was lucky; Jews had died for less.

Paris. The way we think of that beautiful city has changed. That's what they want. They want us to think about things differently, to use Paris as a symbol of bloodshed and fear, not the one we know and love of liberty and culture. That is the nature of extremism: It tries to change who we are, how we see the world, to change our habits and our patterns of thought, to enjoy our freedoms less, to exert control.

Poland faces a horrible wave of extremism after the election of a new right-wing government. As an educator and Polish citizen, I am not only scared by this type of radical hatred, but it also reminds me of the past because the same organization that marches on the streets of Polish cities today, organized boycotts of Jewish institutions and forbade Jewish students from studying at Polish universities before WWII.

USC Shoah Foundation provides some of the tools that educators can choose to use on this day, or any other day in their classroom.

POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews premiered an original short film about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising featuring testimony from the Visual History Archive.