For decades Nathan Poremba deflected his son Joel’s questions about his experiences as a child during the Holocaust. But when an interview with USC Shoah Foundation inspired Nathan to talk, Joel could not bear to face his father’s past. It would take a fateful trip to Israel 20 years later to bring the two together to explore the story.

The documentary Two Sides of Survival just landed Winner of Best Documentary Short at the Angeles Film Festival. Produced by USC Shoah Foundation, Two Sides of Survival brings together stories from the East and West, chronicling how Jews who fled the Nazis in Europe, and Chinese who were threatened by Japanese occupation, improbably found refuge close to one another in the 1930’s and during World War II.

USC Shoah Foundation today launches its 2021-2022 Back to School package, a suite of testimony-based resources on IWitness to help educators navigate the complex issues created by the Covid-19 pandemic and surfaced by the recent upsurge in social movements demanding racial justice. This year’s classroom activities and educator professional development modules are based on testimony from the Visual History Archive that help students to critically evaluate historical context, consider various perspectives and impacts, and reflect on personal connections.

Claire Denault’s Southern California private high school had a problem with classism. So she decided to approach the issue in a way she knew would resonate with her peers: through story. As the student government leader who facilitated a weekly school-wide forum, she invited students to anonymously submit testimonies and personal accounts about how they had been disenfranchised or marginalized because of their socioeconomic status. Claire and other students read those narratives at town hall, and intense dialogue followed—that day and for weeks after.

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.

A four-year initiative to bring together the expertise of USC Shoah Foundation and the Azrieli Foundation—Canada’s leading nationwide Holocaust education program—has culminated with the release of a robust new destination for teachers and students with a variety of bilingual educational materials based on the memoirs and testimonies of Canadian Holocaust survivors.

USC Shoah Foundation today launches a redesigned IWitness website reimagined to make teaching with testimony more effective, approachable and cutting-edge. The new site features all of the functionality educators have praised in IWitness—only better, faster, and more user-friendly.

Today, October 1st, marks the day in 1990 that Rwandan Patriotic Front troops crossed into Rwanda from neighboring Uganda and the beginning of a sequence of events that culminated in the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi that claimed as many as one million lives over the course of approximately 100 days.

Until he retired from the Soviet Red Army in 1967, Leonid Rozenberg carried the banner at the head of the semi-annual military parade in the city of Lugansk, in what is now Ukraine, with hundreds of fellow soldiers marching behind him and thousands of spectators cheering him on. Although highly decorated – his chest was covered in medals – the honor of leading the parade was tainted for Leonid. During his 26 years in the Soviet military Leonid was never promoted beyond the rank of lieutenant colonel. The reason? He was a Jew.

USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of our friend and partner Eddie Jaku, who has passed away in Sydney, Australia, at age 101. Eddie will be remembered for his extraordinary life—which included surviving the Holocaust by escaping from four concentration camps—and for his relentless positivity and kindness to all.

When Deborah Long was a teenager, she often came home to find her mother sitting with the latest issues of Life or Look magazine, quietly tearing out pages. “You see this picture?” her mother would say. “She looks a little like my older sister Ryfka.” Or, “This movie star right here? He reminds me of my father. So handsome.”

USC Shoah Foundation is pleased to welcome its postdoctoral research fellow, Dr. Justin Elliot, who will be in residence at the Institute for a couple of years. In addition to his residency at the Institute, Dr. Elliot is affiliated with USC Dornsife Department of History. Dr.

The Swedish version of USC Shoah Foundation’s Dimensions in Testimony installation was presented in Malmö at the International Forum On Holocaust Remembrance and Combating Antisemitism. Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfvén hosted the event in Malmö on October 13th and visited the installation where he engaged with interactive biographies of two Swedish Holocaust survivors.  King Carl XVI Gustav and Queen Silvia of Sweden attended the forum, where they visited the installation and met with Holocaust survivors.

USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education (USC Shoah Foundation), and Discovery Education today announced the winners of the 2021 Stronger Than Hate Challenge. The 2021 winners exemplify the power of youth voices to connect communities and the role of social-emotional learning in empowering students to overcome hate.

USC Shoah Foundation welcomes the creation of California Governor Gavin Newsom’s Council on Holocaust and Genocide Education. USC Shoah Foundation Finci-Viterbi Executive Director Stephen Smith, who in May offered expert testimony in support of the Council’s creation, said the group will play a critical role in arresting the current decline in awareness about the Holocaust and other acts of genocide among young people. 

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.

November 9 and 10 marks the anniversary of the 1938 Kristallnacht (“The Night of Broken Glass”) pogrom, the first major public and government-sanctioned display of antisemitic violence against Jews in Germany. Orchestrated by the Nazis in retaliation for the assassination of a German embassy official in Paris by a seventeen-year-old Jewish youth named Herschel Grynzspan, 1,400 synagogues and 7,000 businesses were destroyed, almost 100 Jews were killed, and 30,000 were arrested and sent to concentration camps.

The Willesden Project, a partnership program of USC Shoah Foundation and Hold On To Your Music, today announced a new collaboration with the National Center for Families Learning (NCFL) to promote literacy and education through a variety of programs and activities over this school year.

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.

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.

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.

On November 7th 1996, Nancy Fisher, a bundle of nerves, knocked on the door of Erika Gold’s home in Leonia, New Jersey. She was there on behalf of the Shoah Foundation to interview Erika, a Holocaust survivor. Nancy was terrified to conduct the interview. Knowing only the Nancy Fisher of today, I am shocked to hear this. Nancy exudes a calm wisdom, care, and confidence that only 25 years of Holocaust survivor interviewing could foster.

  Call for Applications from PhD Candidates   Greenberg Research Fellowship Katz Research Fellowship in Genocide Studies

USC Shoah Foundation and Discovery Education have announced the winners of the United Kingdom category of the 2021 international Stronger Than Hate Challenge First prize in the challenge was awarded to Elizabeth Stickland, a Year 8 (US 7th grade) student from Attleborough Academy who wrote a powerful poem about how communities can overcome prejudice. Elizabeth’s top prize is a £5,000 ($6,700) grant for her school and an iPad.

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.

In 2018, under the initiative of the Yale Library’s Fortunoff Video Archive, three leading institutions holding large collections of Holocaust testimonies agreed to make a portion of their materials available as transcripts, along with a subset of video recordings, in Let Them Speak / In Search of the Drowned: Testimonies and Testimonial Fragments of the Holocaust (LTS). LTS is a searchable digital anthology of testimonies which examines survivor experiences and uses them to understand the experiences of those who did not survive. It is also a dynamic monograph with essays by Dr.

Longtime USC Shoah Foundation Executive Committee and Board of Councilors member Mickey Shapiro has provided a major endowed gift to create an inaugural academic chair at the Institute that will be dedicated to deepening the study of the impact of Holocaust education.

Today marks the 83rd anniversary of the arrival of the first Kindertransport to the United Kingdom. This rescue operation saved 10,000 child refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe. As part of the commemoration, USC Shoah Foundation has produced an animated short film, “Music Dreams,” based on the story of Lisa Jura, a young Holocaust survivor who in 1938 escaped from Vienna to London on the Kindertransport.

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.

USC Shoah Foundation and The Willesden Project today launch the premiere of Music Dreams, an animated short film story telling the story of Lisa Jura, a young Holocaust survivor who in 1938 escaped from Vienna to London on the Kindertransport.