Join USC Shoah Foundation for an informative conversation with International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)’s Executive Secretary Kathrin Meyer, PhD, on Friday, June 17 in USC’s Leavey Library.

Panama’s Jewish community is commemorating Yom HaShoah virtually this year with a week-long series of thematic Instagram posts that will integrate clips from USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive. In memory of the six million killed, Panama Friends of Yad Vashem coordinated a six-day campaign focused on survivor families in Panama, the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, and community commemorations of Yom HaShoah.

In December 1995, USC Shoah Foundation, then called, Survivors of the Shoah Foundation, held a training session for interviewers in Buenos Aires; bringing together people from different countries of Latin America. The Foundation had just started to collect the survivors’ testimonies throughout the world and was about to start recording testimonies in Brazil.

  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.  

Seventy-seven years ago today, the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games commenced in Germany. Memories of the XI Olympiad loom large in many Holocaust survivors’ minds: 171 testimonies in USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education’s Visual History Archive (VHA) mention the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games.

Welcome to Through Testimony, the official blog of USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education.

Educators from around the world had the opportunity to learn more about IWitness at the Annual Convention of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Nov. 20-23 in Washington, D.C.

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.

A powerful documentary that hinges on USC Shoah Foundation testimony raises difficult questions about how Hungary memorializes victims of the Nazi occupation and confronts its own role in wartime atrocities. Released last year, filmmaker Dániel Ács’ Monument to the Murderers recounts the controversy surrounding a monument erected in Budapest in 2005 to honor local victims of World War II.

The conference hosted by USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research began in earnest Monday morning with a fascinating and at times heart-wrenching presentation by Freddy Peccerelli, executive director of Fundacion de Antropologia Forense de Guatemala (FAFG).

Move-in day for students at the University of Southern California this week led to a remarkable small-world moment between two strangers with ties to the Holocaust in the public-exhibit space of USC Shoah Foundation’s lobby. Fifty-eight-year-old Alexander Moissis of the San Francisco Bay Area and his wife were helping their freshman son move into a dormitory when Alexander decided to steal away for a few minutes to visit USC Shoah Foundation, which is located on campus next to the dorm.

The National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR) will feature full access to the public of the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive (VHA) of over 54,000 testimonies. One of the world’s leading Armenian Studies centers, NAASR advances education and scholarship through supporting and connecting scholars globally and providing outstanding programming to the general public.  NAASR plans to conduct outreach with schools, colleges, libraries, and other institutions in order to spread awareness about the availability of the VHA at NAASR’s headquarters.

During the 1960s, the Guatemalan government unleashed a war against various small guerilla groups across the country. This so-called “internal conflict” turned into a 36-year genocide against Mayan populations.

The 2017-2018 Interdisciplinary Research Week at USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research has come to a close, but for the seven scholars who were awarded this year’s fellowship, the work is just beginning.

The museum staff and students were among the first to see the NDT testimony of Nanjing Massacre survivor Madame Xia Shuqin.

The Museum of Jewish Heritage–A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, in New York, is pleased to announce that starting on Kristallnacht, November 9, it will be the only public institution in New York where visitors can access video testimonies from Holocaust survivors and other witnesses collected by the USC Shoah Foundation Institute.

In spring 1944, after losing nearly his entire family on the day they arrived at Auschwitz II-Birkenau, 22-year-old Dario Gabbai was assigned to one of the special units of Jewish prisoners required to work in the gas chambers and crematoria: the Sonderkommando.

Teachers participating in Facing History and Ourselves’s “Holocaust and Human Behavior” seminar spent a day at USC last week learning how to use IWitness to teach about the Holocaust, genocide, tolerance and other topics.

Virginia Bullington, a sophomore at USC from Nantucket, Massachusetts majoring in American Studies and Narrative Studies, has been chosen as the first-ever Beth and Arthur Lev Student Research Fellow at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research.

"The Girl and The Picture," a film by USC Shoah Foundation that centers on a survivor of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre in China, has been nominated for a 2018 International Documentary Association Award, which is considered among the world’s most important recognitions of the documentary genre.

A special delegation of staff and supporters of the USC Shoah Foundation will visit Rwanda this April during the 20th commemoration of the Rwanda Tutsi Genocide to learn about the Institute’s work in Rwanda, reinforce their commitment, and share the experience with others.

A historical exhibition organized by the Czech district of Prague 2 is exploring the erased traces of Jewish presence with an exhibit in New Town Townhall, located in the former city of Kralovske Vinohrady. A reel of relevant clips of Visual History Archive testimony will complement the exhibition's content.

Last week a group of us from USC Shoah Foundation were in Guatemala with our testimony partner, the Foundation for Forensic Anthropology in Guatemala (FAFG). We attended the funeral of a Mayan man whose remains were recently exhumed by FAFG – 36 years after he disappeared during the genocide there.

The USC Shoah Foundation and The Latin American Network for Education on the Shoah (Red LAES) today launched a new IWitness web page that offers downloadable Spanish-language educational activities based on testimonies from the 56,000-strong Visual History Archive.

USC Shoah Foundation colleagues from around the world met for two days to discuss the progress and next steps of the Visual History Archive Program, which aims to drastically expand access to the Visual History Archive over the next five years.

Today we mourn the loss of one of our closest friends, Branko Lustig, a Holocaust survivor and two-time Academy Award winner who produced Schindler’s List and played an indispensable role in the founding of USC Shoah Foundation. He was 87. Shortly after the film’s 1993 release, Lustig -- who witnessed horrific atrocities at Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and other concentration and labor camps -- led the drive to implement Steven Spielberg’s vision of collecting 50,000 Holocaust testimonies for what was then called Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation.

The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research invites research proposals from USC faculty members and graduate students for its Summer 2016 Research Fellowships. The fellowships provide $3,000 support for USC faculty and USC graduate students doing research focused on the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive and/or other unique USC resources and collections during the summer of 2016.

More than 300 people turned out Wednesday for a public convening at which a high-level panel discussed threats to Holocaust memory caused by growing antisemitism and revisionist campaigns that deny and distort details of the Shoah.

The former goaltender for a well-known Rwandan team literally owes his life to soccer. Now he uses soccer to promote tolerance and unity. This year, he was recognized by Queen Elizabeth.

In the first-ever teacher-authored IWitness activity, Writing in Exile, students close-read poetry as they learn about one woman’s experience during the Holocaust.