Survivors speak to future generations through our innovative, award-winning educational services and programs, including IWitness, IWalks, and our professional development programs for educators such as Echoes & Reflections, produced in partnership with ADL and Yad Vashem.

Porscha specializes in bringing testimony-based education programming, multimedia resources, and digital tools to educators and students. Her top priorities include developing the Mobile Dimensions in Testimony (DiT) program and innovating the William P. Lauder (WPL) Junior Internship program. Porscha establishes and maintains relationships with school district decision makers and staff, vendors, and community organizations.

Ita was a cataloguer and indexer of Holocaust survivors testimonies. She also worked as a translator. She was fluent in Portuguese and Spanish, as well as conversant in Yiddish.

Having been at the Institute for 25 years, Kim Simon was involved in developing and scaling the Institute’s impact and reach globally. She directed the development and implementation of key public engagement programs that connect USC Shoah Foundation to its many distinct audiences.

As we celebrate our 30th anniversary, we pay tribute to some of the people who helped build the organization. Ita Gordon has worked as an indexer, translator, mentor, and researcher at the USC Shoah Foundation since its founding 30 years ago, channeling her passion for the organization’s mission into diligent care and helping to establish the USC Shoah Foundation as a world leader in collecting, preserving, and sharing survivor testimony.

A grandchild of Auschwitz survivors, Mollie’s 3G legacy has influenced her career path in advocacy and public service. Prior to Living Links, Mollie was the chief of staff and director of external affairs for More Perfect, a coalition of presidential foundations, industry leaders, and 100+ nonprofit organizations dedicated to securing America's democratic future. She previously worked on racial equity initiatives at Deloitte, as well as at POLITICO, Hillary for America, and the Obama White House.

The USC Shoah Foundation and Living Links have named Mollie Bowman Managing Director of Living Links, the first national organization created to engage and empower third-generation (3G) descendants of Holocaust survivors. An estimated 1 million grandchildren of Holocaust survivors live in the United States. At a time when the number of Holocaust survivors is dwindling and antisemitism is on the rise, 3Gs are uniquely qualified to offer personal accounts about how unchecked hate led to the Holocaust.

In 2022, USC Shoah Foundation integrated first testimonies of survivors and witnesses of the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, with a particular emphasis on the 1995 genocide in Srebrenica. The integration is the result of the Institute’s partnership with the Srebrenica Memorial Center.

In 1994, the USC Shoah Foundation launched an unprecedented effort to record, preserve, and share the testimonies of Holocaust survivors. Over the past 30 years, we have built a world-class institute anchored in their voices. Today, as Holocaust memory fades and we confront new forces of hatred and antisemitism, the promise we made to survivors 30 years ago demands renewed action. We continue to bear witness for generations to come and hope you will join us with shared purpose and urgency for our Ambassadors for Humanity Gala this fall.

On staff since 2011, strategic communications manager Aaron Zarrow joined the organization for the first time in 1995 as a production assistant. In 1996 he became Associate Producer ofThe Last Days feature documentary. His later credits include Senior Year, a 13-part PBS series; Funny Old Guys, an HBO special presentation; Sir! No Sir! winner of the 2005 LA Film Festival Audience Award for Best Documentary; and Healed: Music, Medicine and Life with MS, a 2014 PBS documentary.

Alla Svitlynets graduated with honors from Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Ukraine, holding a bachelor's degree in history and a master's degree in anthropology. She started her career in Kyiv, but after the outbreak of Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine, Alla made the courageous decision to relocate to Los Angeles. She joined the USC Shoah Foundation team as an Administrative Assistant in March 2024.

With antisemitic harassment and violence surging ferociously around the globe, the USC Shoah Foundation establishes a Countering Antisemitism Laboratory to research and combat one of the world's most virulent hatreds. The USC Shoah Foundation seeks an inaugural director for the Countering Antisemitism Laboratory, which will work with scholars, journalists, policymakers, and other leadership groups to address all forms of antisemitism. The Laboratory will house a major collection of testimonies from survivors of antisemitic violence, training programs centered on understanding and responding to antisemitism, an initiative focused on digital antisemitism and Holocaust denial, and other practical research efforts.

Although antipathy toward Jews and Judaism became a hallmark of medieval Christianity, pinpointing the ancient origins of Christian Anti-Judaism poses challenges. Rabbi Joshua Garroway, PhD, examines the writings of Paul, Justin, Augustine, and other early Christian thinkers to trace the origins of Christian Anti-Judaism.

An invaluable resource for humanity, with nearly every testimony encompassing a complete personal history of life before, during and after the subject’s firsthand experience with genocide. Learn more about the collections that make up the Institute's Visual History Archive.

Leon Bass, who served as a sergeant with the 183rd Engineer Combat Battalion, was among the first U.S. soldiers to enter the Buchenwald concentration camp in April 1945. Inspired by his experiences, he later became a high school principal and spoke extensively about the Holocaust and racism.

Nofar Sarudi reflects on the life of her brother who died saving eight lives at the Nova Festival.

Mirjam Baitalmi, an 88-year-old Jewish Holocaust survivor who survived Kristallnacht in 1938, left on a ship to England while it was being bombed, lost her parents in the Holocaust, and now decades later survived the October 7th Hamas attack on Kibbutz Zikim. On the day of the attack, she spent hours sheltering in her safe room with her caregiver.

Aviv Oz, a visual artist from Ramat Yishai, survived the October 7th attack at the Nova Festival by hiding, facing imminent danger, encountering hostile terrorists, and eventually being rescued. Here he shares his hope for the future.

This event will bring together leading perspectives from researchers, academics and historical archival institutions to explore the pressing challenges and emerging opportunities for building, preserving, and providing access to archives.

In partnership with organizations in the United States and Israel, the USC Shoah Foundation began collecting testimony from survivors of the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, just weeks after they occurred. These testimonies will be preserved and made available to the public as part of the Visual History Archive’s Countering Antisemitism Through Testimony Collection, which documents antisemitism after 1945.

The USC Shoah Foundation stands in solemn tribute to the memory of those murdered by Hamas on October 7, 2023, and to those hostages still in captivity. As we mark this day, we reflect not only on the devastating loss of life but also on the dangerous beliefs that led to this atrocity. The attacks on October 7 revealed the persistence of virulent antisemitism in communities across the globe. Antisemitism threatens the memory of the Holocaust, threatens individual lives and communities, and undermines democratic values, the rule of law, and global security.

Gerald Szames was four years old when his family went into hiding in the forest near the shtetl of Trochenbrod, spending close to three years living in pits. In this clip, Gerald recalls an incident of antisemitism while a student at Ohio State University.

Shortly after her parents were arrested by French police, seven-year-old Nicole Spinner was seized from her school in France and taken to Drancy concentration camp. When she arrived, overwhelmed and suffering from an ear infection, she was cared for and protected by a Jewish woman in the camp, Mariette Etlin, whom she came to refer to as “Marraine” (godmother).

In the summer of 1915 Turkish gendarmes forced all the Armenian residents of Çomakli (now in Turkey) to march 300 miles to Aleppo, Syria, with no food or water. Hagop Asadourian, then 12 years old, was among them. Here he reflects on how surviving in refugee camps and orphanages, and losing 11 family members, shaped his life.

Dr. Richard Hovannisian was one of the world’s foremost scholars of Armenian history and the Armenian Genocide. A child of survivors, he founded the Armenian Genocide Oral History Project at UCLA in 1969, recording interviews with more than 1,000 genocide survivors. He donated the collection to the USC Shoah Foundation in 2018.

Dr. J. Michael Hagopian, who later founded the Armenian Film Foundation, survived the Armenian Genocide after his parents hid him beneath a mulberry bush as Turkish gendarmes approached. In 2010, he partnered with the USC Shoah Foundation to preserve and archive 400 testimonies from the Armenian Film Foundation.