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.

On May 4, 1945, Staff Sergeant Alan Moskin entered the Gunskirchen concentration camp, a subcamp of Mauthausen, with the 66th Infantry, 71st Division. The imperative to document the atrocities, ordered by General Dwight D. Eisenhower, inspired Alan to share his experiences decades later.

Francoise Muteteli was a young teacher in Nyanza, Rwanda, when a Hutu militia attacked her home and murdered her family in April 1994. Francoise escaped the attack by climbing an avocado tree with a bullet wound in her back. A Hutu neighbor hid her in an earthen oven until she was rescued weeks later.

Alphonse Kabalisa was 23 years old when he survived the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. His father and two siblings, as well as extended family members, were killed in the massacres.

Paul Rukesha, then 16, spent three months eluding Hutu militias who were rampaging across Rwanda in April 1994. His father, his stepmother, his brother, and many other relatives were killed in the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. He remembers being rescued by the Rwandan Patriotic Army on July 4, 1994.

Arye Ephrath was born in April 1942 in the basement of his home in Bardejov, where his mother was hiding to avoid deportation. He spent the first three years of his life in hiding, and Arye and his parents were reunited after the war. Here, he reflects on the millions of victims who cannot share their stories.

Floyd Dade served with the 761st Tank Battalion of the U.S. Army, an independent battalion consisting mostly of Black soldiers. He fought in six countries and was attached to the 71st Infantry Division when it liberated the Gunskirchen concentration camp in May 1945. Here he reflects on segregation within the US Army.

As a member of Kibbutz Be’eri’s stand-by unit, Yair Avital left his wife and children in a safe room as he went to the defense of his neighbors. Yair was hit by a bullet and grenades, and saw many friends ruthlessly murdered. While being wheeled into surgery, he learned that his family had survived.

Ron Segev and his younger brother were at the Nova music festival on the morning of October 7. When the attacks began they ran and took cover on the side of a hill, where they came face to face with terrorists. After a narrow escape, they found a jeep and rescued eight people.

Dorin Cohen hid with her husband and two small children in their safe room in Kibbutz Kfar Aza as the Israeli army battled terrorists inside her home. The family was rescued by the Israeli military, who were shocked that anyone had survived the assault and destruction that hit the home.

Ruth Crane survived two ghettos and five concentration camps. Here, she describes how watching her father pray and her mother light Shabbat candles in their home in pre-war Siemianowice, Poland, brought her comfort and peace throughout her life.

Hannah Kaye was at the Chabad of Poway with her parents on Passover in 2019 when an antisemitic gunman entered. Hannah’s mother, Lori Gilbert Kaye, was killed. In this clip, Hannah remembers the sounds and smell of the shooting, and wondering, “where is my mom?”

In the face of the current alarming resurgence in antisemitism, we are expanding our efforts to record testimonies from those who have experienced anti-Jewish hate since 1945 – including those who are experiencing it today. Along with our collection of 55,000 Holocaust survivor testimonies, these new testimonies will be an invaluable resource to researchers, educators, and policymakers in the urgent effort to mitigate the deadly threat of antisemitism to Jewish and non-Jewish communities around the world today.

In 2016, at the age of 25, activist and social entrepreneur Erin Schrode made headlines as she ran for Congress to represent Marin County in Northern California. During the campaign and after, she was targeted by one of North America’s leading neo-Nazis with relentless antisemitic doxing.

Joe Samuels survived the 1941 Farhud, a Nazi-inspired pogrom in Baghdad. With antisemitic restrictions and violence increasing in Iraq with the establishment of the state of Israel, he and his younger brother were smuggled out of Baghdad in 1949. Here, he reflects on the power of accepting one’s destiny.

Rabbi Isaac Levy served as senior Jewish chaplain in the British army, and participated in the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. In this clip, he describes how on a trip to Berlin in 1945, he tried to help Jewish survivors contact relatives around the world.