Emma Heintz and Natalia Podstawka had watched many testimony clips in search of the perfect one to use for their IWitness Video Challenge project. When they found Dina Gottliebova-Babbitt talking about a receiving a smile from a stranger, they knew it was the one.

Lisa Farese is no stranger to encouraging her students to change the world.This was the ninth year the English language arts teacher at Douglas Middle School has assigned her students a project called iCan Change the World and her first time including the IWitness Video Challenge as a component of that project. And just like that, her students Natalia Podstawka and Emma Heintz won the 2015 national IWitness Video Challenge competition.

Cameron Gupton joins the first cohort of IWitness Fellows passionate about IWitness and looking forward to learning new methods for teaching the Holocaust.Gupton has been teaching American History for two years and has worked in both traditional schools and early colleges, including Greene Early College High School in North Carolina. Gupton has been a Teach For America Corps Member, a Gilder Lehrman Seminar participant at Stanford University, and serves on numerous committees at the school level.

The IWitness Summer Teaching Fellowship will provide an exciting and in-depth introduction to IWitness for Wesley Davidson.

USC Shoah Foundation began digitizing Holocaust testimony collections from Holocaust museums across North America last year as part of its Preserving the Legacy initiative. Ever since then, special staff members like Kadie Seitz have been hard at work indexing those thousands of testimonies in preparation for their integration into the Visual History Archive.

Barbara Wahlberg can trace her passion for teaching the Holocaust back to one breakfast in Long Island, New York.She was at a restaurant with her husband when she noticed something unusual about the cook who brought out their food: he had a number tattooed on his arm.She asked her husband what it was, and he told her it meant that the man had been in a concentration camp in Europe during World War II. Wahlberg had never heard of these tattoos, and was shocked that this man – so tall and strong – had experienced such an injustice.

USC Shoah Foundation is sad to learn of the passing of Sir Nicholas Winton, the organizer of the Czechoslovakian Kindertransport and one of the most beloved rescuers of the Holocaust. Winton was 106 years old.

After discovering IWitness for the first time at a professional development workshop led by the ADL, Kristin Ann Collins said she couldn’t believe she had never used video testimony in her classroom before.

Nearly six months after traveling to Poland with USC Shoah Foundation, Soljane Quiles is getting back on a plane and heading to Los Angeles for another program: the first-ever IWitness Teacher Fellowship.At The Highlander Charter School in Rhode Island, Quiles currently teaches 9th and 10th grade history and has been a featured community panelist and award recipient for her dedication to civics education.

Echoes and Reflections inspired Julia Wood's class to make a big effort to promote awareness of the Holocaust in their community.At East Valley Academy in Mesa, Ariz., Wood uses the 10 modules of Echoes and Reflections, which each includes primary sources and testimony clips, to teach about the Holocaust. She attended an Echoes and Reflections educator seminar last summer and said it was “phenomenal,” and even inspired her to teach a semester-long Holocaust literature elective.

Jonathan Friedman’s class at West Chester University in Pennsylvania is nearly finished with the culminating project of their study of the Holocaust in film: a documentary they constructed in IWitness.Friedman, who is currently Professor and Director of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at West Chester University, first learned of IWitness at the Association for Holocaust Organizations (AHO)’s annual conference in January 2015 at USC. He also served as a consulting historian at USC Shoah Foundation, then-titled Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, from 1997-2000.

Read in EnglishTess Gagnage a entrepris d’une étude fascinante sur la participation polonaise à la persécution des Juifs avant et au cours de l’Holocauste.Gagnage est en master 1 d’histoire contemporaine à l’Ecole normale supérieure de Lyon, qui, en 2014, est devenue le premier site de consultation en France de la collection des témoignages de l’USC Shoah Foundation. Ayant entendu parler de ce fonds par Emmanuel Debono, le représentant en France de la fondation, Gagnage a décidé de l’intégrer dans son étude.

Lire en françaisTess Gagnage has embarked on a fascinating study of Polish persecution of Jews before and during the Holocaust through the lens of French-language survivor testimony in the Visual History Archive.Gagnage is a master’s candidate in contemporary history at ENS Lyon, which became the first Visual History Archive full access site in France in 2014. Through the Institute’s French liaison Emmanuel Debono, Gagnage learned of the Visual History Archive and decided to conduct her own study of the testimonies.

Fredy Peccerelli grew up like any other boy in Brooklyn: he played baseball, went to school, and graduated from college. But his family’s history was anything but average.

Madelon Bino and her husband Raoul weren’t quite ready to leave USC Shoah Foundation’s office in Los Angeles when the monthly public visit they attended on July 23 concluded.Instead, they headed straight for a computer as intern Sebastian Goditsch showed them how to access the Visual History Archive and start watching testimony. After just a few minutes, Madelon pointed at the screen and smiled.“That’s one of the interviews I did,” she said.

When Rob Hadley joined 10 other teachers for the IWitness Teaching Fellowship in July, it was far from his first time creating testimony-based lessons and activities.

Professor and Holocaust scholar Kenneth Waltzer has no trouble coming up with topics to research in the Visual History Archive.There’s his current study of the rescue of the children and youths at Buchenwald, or his investigation of the brick mason school in Auschwitz. Or there’s the project he just started a few weeks ago researching how many of the boys liberated from Buchenwald went on to serve in the Palmuch underground army in Israel. No matter what, he says, “if you know the material and you can get into it, you can find all kinds of ways to research in the testimonies.”

Thursday’s event to celebrate the completion of indexing the Institute’s new collection from Jewish Family and Children’s Services (JFCS) of San Francisco was the culmination of not just a year and a half, but eight years of work on the collection for indexer Debbie Kahn.

Indexing USC Shoah Foundation’s new testimony collection from Jewish Family and Children’s Services (JFCS) of San Francisco was an ideal continuation of the work Nancy Saul has done for much of her career.Saul spent 10 years as the reference and information services librarian at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles and also ran the center’s “Ask a Survivor” outreach program, so she was no stranger to testimony when she began working on the JFCS collection at USC Shoah Foundation in January 2014.

Zach Albert’s journey to USC Shoah Foundation to work as an indexer on the Jewish Family and Children’s Services (JFCS) of San Francisco Holocaust testimony collection began when he was 12 years old and preparing for his bar mitzvah.Albert was volunteering at the Dallas Holocaust Museum and had become totally captivated by the survivors he met there – they were like his surrogate grandparents, he said. When it came time for him to decide on a community service project for his bar mitzvah, he noticed that the museum was lacking something important: a Torah scroll.

While her fellow indexers focused on mainly English-language testimonies in USC Shoah Foundation’s new collection from Jewish Family and Children’s Services (JFCS) of San Francisco, Svetlana Ushakova indexed testimonies of Holocaust survivors from her native Russia – who at times felt like her own friends.With a PhD in Russian History from Novosibirsk University, Ushakova joined the JFCS collection with expertise in pre-war Soviet history, though she had not worked very closely with oral history testimonies before.

By spending a year in Los Angeles as USC Shoah Foundation’s Austrian Holocaust Memorial Service intern, Florian Köppl is fulfilling a lifelong dream.Köppl is the 12th young man from Austria to work at USC Shoah Foundation as an alternative to his compulsory military service back home. The Austrian Holocaust Memorial Service, founded by Andreas Maislinger, places accepted applicants at Holocaust memorial institutions around the world, where they live and work for one year.

It wasn’t until she wrote her book A Guest at the Shooter’s Banquet, available now, that Rita Gabis learned the truth about her family’s complicated past.

One of the first steps in the UK’s National Holocaust Centre and Museum’s partnership with USC Shoah Foundation was for James Griffiths to participate in the IWitness Teaching Fellowship this summer.

Melinda Goldrich continued her family’s tradition of philanthropy by hosting a special event to introduce a new audience in Aspen, Colo., last night to the work of USC Shoah Foundation.

The memorial service for Yevnige Salibian, one of the last remaining survivors of the 1915 Armenian Genocide, was held today in Mission HIlls, Calif. Salibian died August 29, 2015, at 101 years old.A force of nature well into her hundreds, Salibian gave testimony about her childhood experiences to USC Shoah Foundation in 2014.

Professor Alejandro Baer, now from the University of Minnesota, was first attracted to USC Shoah Foundation in 2000, when it was titled Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation and was deep into its project to collect 50,000 testimonies of Holocaust survivors around the world.

When Tiffany Taylor, director of Teach for America – Detroit, first received an email inviting her to join the advisory board for USC Shoah Foundation’s IWitness Detroit program, she admits it was the first time she had heard of IWitness.But one line in the email caught her eye: “testimony-based education.” Taylor said she was intrigued by this idea and thought immediately about its potential for strengthening the educational movement in Detroit by uplifting student voices in a way that only firsthand experiences can.

A team of eight staff members from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Levine Institute for Holocaust Education is responsible for bringing the Some Were Neighbors IWitness activity to life.

Attendees of the 2015 Ambassadors for Humanity gala in Detroit on Thursday will get to hear remarks from a Michigan educator who is one of USC Shoah Foundation’s most passionate colleagues.