Italy’s National Archives to Launch Web Portal to Survivor Testimonies

Speaking at USC on Feb. 20, Zainab Hawa Bangura, the United Nations Undersecretary-General and Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, said that sexual assault is a deliberate tactic used to demoralize not only women – its most frequent targets – but also destroy families and tear apart communities.

During her lecture as the 2014-15 Center Fellow of the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research on Thursday at USC Doheny Memorial Library, Peg LeVine shared her experiences studying a unique form of violence during the Cambodian Genocide.

USC Shoah Foundation is planning to record 20 new testimonies for the second phase of its North Africa and Middle East collection. Fundraising is currently underway for this phase to begin.

For much of their life, Allen and Peter Adamson didn't know that Joe, their easy-going, suburbanite dad, a VP at a New York plastics company, had a remarkable early history. He had escaped Germany at the age of 14 on the Kindertransport, served as an interrogator with the U.S. Army during the liberation of Mauthausen Concentration Camp, and helped in a U.S. effort to intercept secret messages encoded in German postage stamps.

USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of Betty Grebenschikoff, a Jewish Holocaust survivor, author, and speaker, who was reunited with a childhood friend in February 2021, 81 years after the pair had last seen one other in a Berlin schoolyard. The reunion, made possible by a longtime researcher at USC Shoah Foundation, touched hearts across the world.  

Over the course of the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research’s three-day conference “A Conflict? Genocide and Resistance in Guatemala,” over a dozen scholars from all over the world gave presentations about their research on various aspects of the Guatemalan Genocide. Here is a sample of just a few of those presentations.

Maximilian Kolbe, born in Poland in 1894, was a Franciscan friar and Catholic priest. He spent most of his life studying theology and dedicating himself to the church, traveling across Europe and Asia during his lifetime.

Kimberly Cheng (PhD candidate in Hebrew & Judaic Studies and History, New York University) 2018-2019 Breslauer, Rutman & Anderson Research Fellow “American Dreams: Jewish Refugees and Chinese Locals in Post-World War II Shanghai” September 27, 2018

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.

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.

Shaul Ladany, an 88-year-old world-record holding speed-walker, has defied death multiple times. As a small child, he survived the German occupation of Budapest and Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Then, representing Israel in the 1972 Munich Olympics, he narrowly escaped the massacre that took the lives of 11 Israeli athletes.

Viterbi Family Foundation grants gift to Institute.

Under an assumed identity, Joseph André Scheinmann ran a French Resistance network of 300 agents that funneled information to the British. After his arrest and internment, he continued his scheming to save the lives of 100s of fellow prisoners.

On the day that Faye Schulman’s parents and siblings were killed, along with almost all the Jews of her Eastern Polish town of Lenin, Schulman (then Faigel Lazebnik) was pulled aside by a Nazi officer. The Nazi official had been to Schulman’s studio a few weeks previously. After invading the town in 1942, the Nazis had ordered the talented young photographer to take photographs—both to document their activities in the town and to provide their officers with vanity portraits. Schulman remembered the photo session with the Nazi who now pulled her aside.

When Sam Kadorian was a child, Ottoman soldiers would conduct drills in a field near his home in Mezre (modern-day Elazığ, Turkey), adjacent to the fortress town of Kharpert. Sam would stand close by, mimicking their drills.

You’re never too old to learn about cultural diversity. I realized this over the weekend, on the eve of Hanukkah. My mom, a fourth grade teacher, told me about an incident she’d just experienced at a local party-supply store. She was shopping for her annual Hanukkah lesson, in which she briefly teaches her students the meaning of the holiday, demonstrates how she lights our family menorah, and leads them in a spirited game of dreidel. Everyone goes home with a little bag of chocolate gelt, a dreidel and maybe a Hanukkah-themed pencil.

Diana Hekimian, an active member of the Armenian community in Los Angeles, found an original copy of one of the earliest reports of the 1915 genocide in Armenia: "The Diyarbekir Massacres and Kurdish Atrocities," by Thomas Mugerditchian.

The education, community and peace-building Rwanda Peace Education Program (RPEP) has concluded after three years, and its partners have begun to evaluate the impact of USC Shoah Foundation’s role in the program, with positive results.

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.

USC Shoah Foundation has significantly increased its reach online and in the classroom over the past three years, according to new statistics released about the Institute’s 2016 fiscal year.

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 study will examine IWitness’s effectiveness in developing students’ capacity to become more responsible participants in civil society through the educational use of genocide survivor and witness testimony.

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 film was honored with the Creative Arts Award, VR – Documentary Jury Prize, at the awards ceremony held at the Warner Bros. Studio in Hollywood.

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.

Rather than ameliorate a developing humanitarian nightmare, the Evian Conference that began on July 6, 1938 was a display of self-interest. Nearly every country – including the United States – refused to raise their refugee quotas as the onset of the Holocaust drew closer. Only the Dominican Republic offered to relax its restrictions.

This month, the 2017-2019 Interdisciplinary Research Week team came together again for their second weeklong residency at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research.

Brigittine M.

Sara R. Horowitz, Professor of Comparative Literature and Jewish Studies at York University and an esteemed scholar of the Holocaust, has been named the 2020-2021 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research. She will deliver a public lecture and spend over a week in residence at the Center in March 2022.