USC Shoah Foundation is saddened to learn of the recent passing of Sol Gringlas, who survived both the Nordhausen and Auschwitz concentration camps. Sol passed away in May of 2020. He was 100.

USC Shoah foundation is saddened to learn of the recent passing of Anneliese Nossbaum, who survived a Jewish ghetto and three concentration camps. Anneliese passed away March 23, 2020 after falling ill within weeks of returning from a trip that commemorated the 75-year anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. She was 91. She was born on January 8, 1929 in Guben, Germany as Anneliese Winterberg.  At the age of two, her family moved to Bonn where her father later became the rabbi of their synagogue.  

Professor Peter Hayes, world-renowned scholar of the history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, will serve as the 2019-2020 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research.

Today we mourn the loss of Hanna Pankowsky, a remarkable woman who gave us her testimony and was one of the subjects in a portrait series of Holocaust survivors painted by David Kassan.

  “Makeshift Murder: The Holocaust at Its Peak” Peter Hayes (Northwestern University) 2019-2020 Shapiro Scholar in Residence March 5, 2020

USC Shoah Foundation is saddened to hear of the recent passing of Millie Zuckerman, Holocaust survivor and longtime friend of the Institute. Millie was surrounded by her family when she passed away on August 9, 2020 at the age of 94. She was born on September 25, 1925 in Humniska, Poland and was a hidden child of the Holocaust.

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.

USC Shoah Foundation announced a new partnership with Ancestry® to provide free access to searchable data from nearly 50,000 Jewish Holocaust survivor testimonies that are in the Visual History Archive® (VHA). “We are grateful that Ancestry is providing access to this initial set of metadata and enhancing the discoverability of our archive and this critically important history,” said Stephen Smith, Finci-Viterbi Executive Director at USC Shoah Foundation. Here’s how it works:

USC Shoah Foundation today mourns the loss of a close friend, George Weiss, a longtime volunteer with the Institute and a Holocaust survivor who endured homelessness and life on the run as a young child separated from his parents in both France and Belgium during the war. He was 87. Weiss was a familiar and beloved presence at the offices of the Institute, stopping in every week to curate and work with clips of video testimony from the Visual History Archive, which contains 55,000 life stories of survivors and witnesses to the Holocaust and other genocides.

The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research hosted professors Marianne Hirsch (Columbia University) and Leo Spitzer (Dartmouth College), who gave a lecture based on their recently published book School Photos in Liquid Time: Reframing Difference.

Only a day after the University of Southern California announced that it would conduct a three-day test to move all classes online, which soon turned into a permanent arrangement until the end of Spring semester, my colleague and I gave our last in-person introduction to the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive to a USC class. Perhaps serendipitously, one of the topics discussed in this class was physical health.

The Institute mourns the passing of members of our community in 2020, including survivors who have given testimony Hanna Pankowsky, Dario Gabbai, Anneliese Nossbaum, Éva Székely, Itka Zygmuntowicz,

Wilma Bulkin Siegel was seven years old in 1945 when her father took her to the movies to watch newsreels of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. “Why couldn’t I have done something about it?” she whispered to her father. Decades later, Siegel, a retired New York City oncologist and a pioneer in hospice care, has discovered a new tool for making an impact: a paintbrush.

Panama’s Jewish community is commemorating Yom HaShoah virtually this year with a week-long series of thematic Instagram posts that will integrate clips from USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive. In memory of the six million killed, Panama Friends of Yad Vashem coordinated a six-day campaign focused on survivor families in Panama, the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, and community commemorations of Yom HaShoah.

USC Shoah Foundation has launched a path-breaking online teaching tool to enable students and educators to ask questions that prompt real-time recorded responses from Holocaust survivor Pinchas Gutter. The tool will be available at no cost through a new activity in the Institute’s flagship educational website, IWitness.

The elderly population is among the hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the victims include a large and growing number of Holocaust survivors and World War II veterans.

Florian Zabranksy, a PhD candidate at the Centre for German-Jewish Studies at the University of Sussex, United Kingdom, has been awarded the 2020-2021 Margee and Douglas Greenberg Research Fellowship at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research. He will be in residence at the Center in Spring 2021 in order to conduct research for his dissertation, which examines male Jewish intimacy during the Holocaust.

In 2017, Mr. Feingold recorded a more than 4 hour testimony with USC Shoah Foundation as part of the Last Chance Testimony Collection, enabling Holocaust survivors to share their stories for USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive—before it is too late—where they will exist in perpetuity.

My recent stay at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my academic career.  From the remarkable power and content of the Visual History Archive, to the welcoming and helpful nature of the staff and donor community, I leave my term as the Breslauer, Rutman, and Anderson Research Fellow strengthened by new friendships and enriched by new findings for my work. 

The portrait I have been working on of Dario isn’t complete yet, but what an honor it was to have met him and is now to engage with his testimony through the act of painting,” said David Kassan of hi

We are very saddened at the USC Shoah Foundation to learn that our friend and Holocaust survivor Cantor Moshe Taube has passed away at age 93. Cantor Taube was among 1,200 Jews saved by Oskar Schindler during the Holocaust and led in the chanting of prayers at Congregation Beth Shalom in Pittsburgh.

As we wrap up a very challenging year for many across the globe, we want to share highlights of just some of the work our Institute team and our partners have accomplished during the ongoing pandemic. Thank you for your support.

Alan Auyeung pulled on a pair of latex gloves and a N95 face mask. For good measure, he placed a pair of protective goggles over his eyes too. A trip to the supermarket? In these Covid-19 times, it could have been but, in fact, Auyeung was preparing for a task of quite a different nature: saving the testimonies of Holocaust survivors, whose eye witness accounts of Nazi atrocities were at risk of being eaten away by mold.

“Walking a Fine Line: Hungarian-Jewish Survivors and the Discourse Surrounding Sexual Violence in Postwar Testimonies” Allison Somogyi USC-Yale Postdoctoral Research Fellow August 27, 2020

On April 17, 1975, the city of Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge, triggering a four-year genocide. In commemoration, USC Shoah Foundation is spotlighting its Cambodia-based learning activities for high school students.