Yiddish Poet and Holocaust survivor Rikva Basman Ben-Hayim died March 22, 2023, at 98. In her March 1996 testimony, Holocaust survivor Adela Bay, who was in Kaiserwald concentration camp with Rivka, remembers the opening lines of Rivka's poem reflecting on the humanity that still remains through a person's eyes, despite the inhumanity of a shaved head and wearing a prison uniform.

Stephen Kalmar, an activist who fled Austria in the 1930’s and emigrated to Mexico with his wife in 1940.

Heinz Geggel was Secretary of the Freies Deutschland anti-Nazi group in Cuba during World War Two.

In this keynote from March 28, 2023, in recognition of the Mickey Shapiro Endowed Chair in Holocaust Education Research at the University of Southern California, distinguished scholar Mary Helen Immordino-Yang suggests that the foundation of the future of education is rooted in story – stories that help us care.

In this clip from his 2019 interview, recorded for the Visual History Archive, WWII veteran and liberator Alan Moskin speaks of the importance of giving testimony. Alan Moskin passed away in 2023 at the age of 96. Read our tribute to him.

In this presentation, Elyse Semerdjian outlines the earliest Armenian pilgrimages to the killing fields of Dayr al-Zur in the Syrian Desert. It is there that Armenians interacted with the remains of Armenians murdered during the Armenian Genocide (1915-1918) in acts of remembrance. Semerdjian discusses the origins of the now-destroyed Armenian Genocide Memorial in Dayr al-Zur and the ritual and collection habits of pilgrims that enact what she calls bone memory.

In this talk, Renana Keydar and Eitan Wagner examine the meeting point between testimony and computation, the new possibilities inherent in such an encounter and the challenges and risks involved. They introduce the new avenues for listening to the multitude of testimonies in the archives afforded by the development of advanced computational tools. The talk presents a computational model of "distant listening," which is motivated by the moral commitment to the integrity of each testimony while simultaneously approaching the multiplicity of testimonies as such.

Marta describes an instance of Holocaust denial which occurred at a school where she spoke.

Tisha B'Av (The Ninth of Av) is a day of mourning and fasting. The holiday commemorates various tragedies that befell the Jewish people throughout history, particularly the destruction of the first and second Temples in 586 BCE and 70 CE. In her testimony, Holocaust survivor Edith Reifer recalls fasting on Tisha B’av while imprisoned at Krakau-Plaszow labor camp.

Michael Klein remembers saying Rosh Hashanah prayers with his father in Golleschau labor camp, a subsidiary camp of Auschwitz III. 

Learn more about the William P. Lauder Junior Internship Program.

On September 6, 2023, the USC Shoah Foundation held 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.

Holocaust survivor Helen Lewis describes fasting for Yom Kippur at Praust concentration camp, a subcamp of Stutthof, in 1944. 

The inaugural lecture of the USC Shoah Foundation’s Antisemitism Lecture Series featured Dr. Dov Waxman, Professor of Political Science and Director of UCLA’s Nazarian Center for Israel Studies. Dr. Waxman lectures on his co-authored article, Arguing about antisemitism: why we disagree about antisemitism, which examines why criticism of Israel, definitions of antisemitism, and identifying acts as antisemitic have all become contentious issues.