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.

Presented as part of USC’s Genocide Awareness Week, three events organized by the USC Shoah Foundation will explore artistic responses to genocide, highlighting the ability of creative expression to shine light in the darkness and give voice to silence. The events will reveal the power of the arts to communicate messages of survival and hope in the face of great tragedy. The series is sponsored by the USC Visions and Voices initiative.

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.

Participants from the 2010 Master Teacher Workshop meet a year later to share their testimony-based projects and discuss the progress of piloting them in the classroom.  They also receive continuing education credits.The USC Shoah Foundation Institute hosted a three-day follow-up workshop for 18 educators who attended the 2010 Master Teacher Workshop, which is the centerpiece of the “Teaching With Testimony” certification program.

Speaking at USC on Feb. 20, Zainab Hawa Bangura, the United Nations Undersecretary-General and Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, said that sexual assault is a deliberate tactic used to demoralize not only women – its most frequent targets – but also destroy families and tear apart communities.

Evenson Design Group-built website has numerous advantages.

One year after learning how to incorporate testimony into their lesson plans, the 2013 Teaching with Testimony in the 21st Century graduates in Hungary returned for a follow-up session to share the lessons they have now piloted in their classrooms.

Educators can now access three of USC Shoah Foundation’s Ukrainian-language lesson guides and modules for free on the USC Shoah Foundation website. Each lesson includes everything teachers need including testimony and film clips.

Today Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, the nonprofit organization that videotapes the firsthand testimonies of Holocaust survivors and other witnesses and make them accessible for educational purposes, opened a rare collection of Sinti and Roma Holocaust survivor testimonies at the Dokumentations und Kulturzentrum Deutscher Sinti und Roma (Documentation and Culture Centre of the German Sinti and Roma) in Heidelberg.

USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of Betty Grebenschikoff, a Jewish Holocaust survivor, author, and speaker, who was reunited with a childhood friend in February 2021, 81 years after the pair had last seen one other in a Berlin schoolyard. The reunion, made possible by a longtime researcher at USC Shoah Foundation, touched hearts across the world.  

Montreal, March 23, 2015 – As the world marks the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II and the liberation of the Jews of Europe, the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre (MHMC) and Sarah and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre in Toronto are proud to announce an historic agreement with USC Shoah Foundation - The Institute for Visual History and Education to have their testimonies integrated in the Visual History Archive as part of the Institute’s Preserving the Legacy initiative.

The former goaltender for a well-known Rwandan team literally owes his life to soccer. Now he uses soccer to promote tolerance and unity. This year, he was recognized by Queen Elizabeth.

Eighty-five years ago, millions of residents of Ukraine were starved to death as a result of the Soviet-era policies under Joseph Stalin’s totalitarian regime. The man-made famine of 1932-1933, also known as Holodomor, is part of my home country’s history that I grew to fully understand only through my work at USC Shoah Foundation.

I never intended to spend months listening to Holocaust testimonies.  My name is Chaya Nove, I am a sociolinguist working on a doctoral dissertation about language change in Yiddish vowels. In my research, I consider the Yiddish spoken by Hasidic Jews in New York today (Hasidic Yiddish, or HY) as a living, changing language, with the understanding that this language was once spoken by a group of people in another time and place. 

USC Shoah Foundation has moved into the next chapter of its work, with noted international expert and governmental advisor on Holocaust remembrance and antisemitism Dr. Robert Williams appointed as Andrew J. and Erna Finci Viterbi Executive Director.

Viterbi Family Foundation grants gift to Institute.

Under an assumed identity, Joseph André Scheinmann ran a French Resistance network of 300 agents that funneled information to the British. After his arrest and internment, he continued his scheming to save the lives of 100s of fellow prisoners.

On the day that Faye Schulman’s parents and siblings were killed, along with almost all the Jews of her Eastern Polish town of Lenin, Schulman (then Faigel Lazebnik) was pulled aside by a Nazi officer. The Nazi official had been to Schulman’s studio a few weeks previously. After invading the town in 1942, the Nazis had ordered the talented young photographer to take photographs—both to document their activities in the town and to provide their officers with vanity portraits. Schulman remembered the photo session with the Nazi who now pulled her aside.

In October 1942, when deportations from the Warsaw ghetto paused, more than 20 youth groups and underground units coalesced into a united front. Vladka Meed channeled her despair at losing her family into fighting the Nazis.

USC Shoah Foundation Institute hosts panel discussion.

Jerome Nemer Lecture & Film Documentary Flyer.pdf

In January 2015, I had the incredible opportunity to travel to Poland with other students, as a junior intern, for USC Shoah Foundation’s and Discovery Education’s Auschwitz: Past is Present program, commemorating the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

Diana Hekimian, an active member of the Armenian community in Los Angeles, found an original copy of one of the earliest reports of the 1915 genocide in Armenia: "The Diyarbekir Massacres and Kurdish Atrocities," by Thomas Mugerditchian.

The education, community and peace-building Rwanda Peace Education Program (RPEP) has concluded after three years, and its partners have begun to evaluate the impact of USC Shoah Foundation’s role in the program, with positive results.

After nearly three years of the IWitness in Rwanda program, IWitness will debut new activities created by some of the teachers who participated in the program.

Today IWitness launched its entire suite of new content and features to coincide with the new school year, including 13 new multimedia activities on a variety of languages and topics.

LOS ANGELES – Sept. 6, 2016 – USC Shoah Foundation’s Center for Advanced Genocide Research is gearing up to host an international conference on the genocide that ravaged Guatemala at the height of the Cold War in the early 1980s. It will be the first gathering of its kind ever held.

LOS ANGELES – Aug. 31, 2016 – In preparation for the new school year, USC Shoah Foundation unveils its annual update of IWitness, a free online resource that is among the world’s foremost education tools for teaching compassion.

The foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” (German acronym EVZ) is hosting an international workshop on the use of Holocaust survivor testimonies in education January 9-11.

One would think that the grandson of four Polish Holocaust survivors would have an in-depth knowledge of the Shoah, but it was quite the contrary. The Holocaust was a topic that was never discussed when I was growing up. When it was introduced, it was in the most unconventional way, through satire film and television. I knew this was just a facade draped over the painful truth.