Auschwitz survivor Eva Kor will be in Los Angeles next week to film an interview for New Dimensions in Testimony, USC Shoah Foundation’s three-dimensional, interactive virtual encounter with Holocaust survivors.

Painter David Kassan has sat with survivors of the Holocaust for countless hours during the past five years, carefully listening to their stories of pain, grief, resilience and quiet victory.

On the occasion of the commemoration of Kristallnacht, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, Holocaust survivor and gifted cellist, along with her children Raphael and Maya, grandson Abraham and niece Michal, will offer an intimate glimpse inside their family history. Letters from the family archive, photographs and musical pieces tell the story of her love-filled childhood home in Breslau, the Nazis seizure of power and the subsequent fate of her family.

Coinciding with the 25th anniversary and recent rerelease of “Schindler’s List,” USC Shoah Foundation has produced a suite of learning activities connected to the film. The engaging activities encourage critical thinking; all feature clips of testimony from Holocaust survivors who were saved by Oskar Schindler.

Michigan student Brandon Bartley shares how testimony inspired him when he participated in the IWitness Detroit program last summer.

The young boy was walking down the street in Łodz, Poland, when he spotted the treasure. He could not believe his luck! He picked up the belt admiring its beautiful etchings and the decorative metal buckle. With his chest out, he proudly continued walking down the street with his new treasure rolled up and safe in his pocket. Now he would be able to wear long pants instead of the short pants and suspenders young boys wore. His new belt would rocket him from boyhood to manhood status! What a monumental find!

Join the Maimonides Institute for Medicine, Ethics and the Holocaust and the USC Shoah Foundation - The Institute for Visual History and Education as we commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day with the official launch of the Project on Bioethics and the Holocaust: Using Testimony in Medical and Health Professions Education.

The man who carried out one of the most extraordinary missions of World War II is the subject of a new documentary that will screen at select theaters in Los Angeles and New York City throughout November.

Survivors and their testimonies have been central to Holocaust research and memorial culture. Even before the end of the Shoah, survivor historians in parts of Eastern Europe liberated from Nazi occupation collected testimonies and conducted interviews with fellow survivors.

Visitors to the Auschwitz Jewish Center in Oświęcim, Poland, will view USC Shoah Foundation testimony in the center’s permanent exhibit beginning in May.

Students and teachers from all over the Bay Area will attend a workshop about USC Shoah Foundation testimony and IWitness at Jewish Family and Children’s Services (JFCS) of San Francisco’s annual Day of Learning on Sun., March 23.

       

The other morning I checked the BBC News website like I always do only to discover that French film director Alain Resnais had passed away at the age of ninety-one. Resnais’s films frequently explored the relationship between memory, consciousness, and the imagination in a non-linear manner and his innovative method of filmmaking won him numerous awards and prestige throughout his prolific career.

One of the world’s leading experts on the subject of the Holocaust is coming to USC Shoah Foundation’s Center for Advanced Genocide Research, where he will further develop his current project about Jewish-Arab relations in Israel and Palestine, the Center announced today.

Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Yom HaShoah as it’s known in Hebrew, commemorates and honors the victims and survivors of the Holocaust. This year, people around the world will remember the victims of the Holocaust May 4-5, 2016.

USC Shoah Foundation’s soon-to-launch IWitness initiative, called “100 Days to Inspire Respect,” provides teachers of civics, history, English and other subjects with 100 thought-provoking resources that tackle hate, racism, intolerance, xenophobia and more.

Living Links, the first national organization created to engage and empower third-generation (3G) descendants of Holocaust survivors, has joined forces with the USC Shoah Foundation. The new partnership will expand a Living Links program that teaches 3Gs to share their family stories in classrooms and with community groups to counter antisemitism, bigotry and hate. At a time when the number of Holocaust survivors is dwindling and antisemitism is on the rise, 3Gs are uniquely positioned to offer personal accounts about how unchecked intolerance and hate led to the Holocaust.

The USC Shoah Foundation partnered with the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) on the development and launch of Inside Kristallnacht, an innovative mixed-reality experience that presents audiences the events of Kristallnacht through the eyes of Holocaust survivor and activist Dr. Charlotte Knobloch.

The fourth museum installation of New Dimensions in Testimony kicked off last week at CANDLES Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Terre Haute, Indiana. It will remain open to the public for the next three months.

My father was born and raised in Sighet, Romania, just down the road from the Elie Wiesel's simple blue childhood home. When the Nobel laureate's house was spray-painted with antisemitic slurs this summer, it felt like an attack on my own familial history.

The Cold War began its thaw 25 years ago, then apparently melted sufficiently for us to get on with our lives without fear. Surprisingly, the slow thaw is still in progress.

As an educator who has used IWitness to teach various subjects, units and topics here are some tips to integrating testimony into any curriculum, including Science.

I did not sleep well last night. It was not the kind of sleeplessness brought on by jet lag, stress or workload. It is best described as a kind of numbness that leaves one physically discharged, emotionally drained and deeply troubled. I just completed one the most sedentary days I’ve had in months, just sitting in a chair listening to one of the most intelligent, sophisticated, gentle, yet strong people I know tell me about his life.

Pictured: Holocaust survivor Elly Gotz who gave his testimony to the Azrieli Foundation in 2018. His interview is one of 31 new testimonies from the Azrieli Foundation that have been indexed and catalogued in the Visual History Archive. This week’s semi-annual VHA release adds 128 new testimonies to the 55,000-strong collection. All the updated testimonies are available at 163 access sites worldwide.

French film director Claude Lanzmann spoke candidly about his latest film, The Last of the Unjust, at a USC School of Cinematic Arts screening hosted by USC Shoah Foundation Tuesday night.

The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research is proud to announce the publication of a new book entitled New Perspectives on Kristallnacht: After 80 Years, the Nazi Pogrom in Global Comparison, edited by Wolf Gruner and Steve Ross.

What are the pillars of modern democracy and how can democracy be defended in days of crisis? These questions keep coming to me these days, when Poland faces a really serious crisis that so far has caused a huge polarization in Polish society that divides neighbors, colleagues, friends, even families. Being an educator for almost 30 years, teaching first young students, then teenagers and finally teachers about history, civil rights and human rights, I have realized what a huge setback the Polish educational system has suffered.

The University of Southern California has established the Center for Advanced Genocide Research to study how and why such instances of mass violence occur, and how to intervene in the cycle that can lead to them.

Historian Tyaglyy arrives in Los Angeles to make use of archive.

The contest aims to perpetuate in students the memory of the resistance and the deportation in France during the Holocaust so that they can draw inspiration from it and draw civic lessons from it in their lives today.