USC Shoah Foundation is saddened to learn of the passing of Holocaust survivor Curt Lowens, a wartime hero who became a well-known character actor when he moved to the United States. He was 91. Born Curt Lowenstein on Nov. 17, 1925 in Germany, Lowen and his family had planned to emigrate to the United States as World War II was starting, but they were stopped from leaving the Netherlands when the Germans invaded that country. He was briefly deported to the Westerbork concentration camp in 1943, but he was released because of his father’s business connections.
/ Thursday, May 11, 2017
USC Shoah Foundation is saddened to learn of the passing of Holocaust survivor Curt Lowens, a wartime hero who became a well-known character actor when he moved to the United States. He was 91. Born Curt Lowenstein on Nov. 17, 1925 in Germany, Lowen and his family had planned to emigrate to the United States as World War II was starting, but they were stopped from leaving the Netherlands when the Germans invaded that country. He was briefly deported to the Westerbork concentration camp in 1943, but he was released because of his father’s business connections.
in memoriam / Thursday, May 11, 2017
The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research will host a symposium to honor the work of leading Holocaust scholar David Cesarani from Great Britain, who died last year just weeks after being named the Center’s inaugural Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence.
/ Wednesday, August 10, 2016
USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research’s 2017 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence Omer Bartov began his residence today with a Facebook Live interview about his work.
cagr, mickey shapiro / Friday, May 5, 2017
At the behest of his father, 17-year-old Erwin Rautenberg boarded a steamer for South America in 1937 to escape Nazi Germany. His brother, sister, and parents planned to join him, but never made it. His father died in 1938, soon after being
forced into the German army. The rest of the family was killed during the Holocaust.
/ Monday, August 14, 2017
Rautenberg's longtime accountant, Tom Corby, now the president of the foundation that bears the Rautenberg name, remembers Erwin as a hard-working, deeply principled man. “He established the Erwin Rautenberg Foundation to strengthen Jewish causes,” Corby says. “He wanted to make sure that the Jewish people and religion endured.”
/ Friday, October 16, 2020
Diane Wohl and her husband, Howard, have supported USC Shoah Foundation — The Institute for Visual History and Education since before it became part of the university. They appreciate how the Institute brings people together and, as she puts it, “can slice out all the propaganda and hate with its visual testimonies.”
/ Friday, November 20, 2020
An animated short film that brings to life the remarkable childhood journey of media personality, author and Holocaust survivor Dr. Ruth K. Westheimer netted one of the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival’s three coveted Audience Awards last month. Produced by USC Shoah Foundation and Delirio Films, Ruth: A Little Girl’s Big Journey traces Dr. Ruth’s escape from Nazi Germany during the Holocaust. The film was awarded the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival’s Best Short Film prize in early April.
/ Wednesday, May 11, 2022
McBride will first give a lunchtime workshop on how to use the Visual History Archive in research and teaching. At 7 p.m., he will give a lecture "Of course, they were Neighbors": Testimony, Archives and the Holocaust in Ukraine.” Both will be held at Belk Library and Information Commons room 114.
cagr, greenberg fellow / Wednesday, August 9, 2017
In MemoriumOur friend and fellow scholar Harry Reicher passed away October 27, 2014.
/ Wednesday, July 23, 2014
At a time of heightened political uncertainty and polarization, middle and high school teachers are in need of easy-to-use resources that encourage their students to grapple with some of the most difficult but important topics: hate, racism, intolerance and xenophobia.
100 Days / Wednesday, January 11, 2017
For a historian, using a top-down approach is standard – you use government records, archives of primary and secondary sources to fulfill your research; you undress the documents and make sure they stand up, factually, and you stop there. But a bottom-up approach can provide a more complete image of an event, allowing those who lived through the time a voice in history.
/ Monday, January 23, 2017
Seventy-seven years ago today, the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games commenced in Germany. Memories of the XI Olympiad loom large in many Holocaust survivors’ minds: 171 testimonies in USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education’s Visual History Archive (VHA) mention the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games.
olympics, sports, jesse owens, diane jacobs, endre altman, frances jones, hitler, Berlin / Thursday, August 1, 2013
We are saddened to hear of the recent passing of Jack Welner, who survived a Jewish ghetto in Poland, a labor camp near the Dachau concentration camp in Germany, and the Auschwitz Nazi death camp in Poland – where his mother was murdered on arrival – before immigrating to Denver, Colorado, where he began a new life. He was 98. When Welner gave his testimony to USC Shoah Foundation in 1995, it changed his life.
/ Friday, September 27, 2019
On November 7th 1996, Nancy Fisher, a bundle of nerves, knocked on the door of Erika Gold’s home in Leonia, New Jersey. She was there on behalf of the Shoah Foundation to interview Erika, a Holocaust survivor. Nancy was terrified to conduct the interview. Knowing only the Nancy Fisher of today, I am shocked to hear this. Nancy exudes a calm wisdom, care, and confidence that only 25 years of Holocaust survivor interviewing could foster.
/ Thursday, November 11, 2021
Professor Atina Grossmann gave a public lecture co-hosted by the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research and the USC Max Kade Institute, offering a different reading of World War II and the Holocaust by mapping Jewish death, survival, and displacement via what she called the geographical margins – the colonial and semi-colonial regions including the Soviet interior, Central Asia, Iran, and British India.
cagr / Monday, May 9, 2016
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:
/ Wednesday, August 26, 2020
The top stories of 2017 including media coverage of the Institute's work throughout the year.
/ Monday, January 29, 2018
Annabel Carballo-Mesa is a PhD candidate at the University of Barcelona. Since January 17 she has been in Los Angeles conducting research with Visual History Archive (VHA) testimonies for a dissertation provisionally entitled “Na Bister! (Don’t Forget!) An Oral History of the Roma and Sinti Genocide”.
roma-sinti, Roma Sinti, research / Thursday, January 27, 2022
Ben Ferencz, the last remaining prosecutor from the Nuremberg Trials who passed away in Florida earlier this month, gave countless interviews over the course of his illustrious career. But surely none was longer, or more technically challenging, than the three-day testimony he gave to USC Shoah Foundation at the height of the Covid pandemic in July 2020. The need for social distancing necessitated that filming be done remotely, with boxes of sophisticated equipment shipped to Ferencz’s modest Florida home.
/ Monday, April 17, 2023
Until he retired from the Soviet Red Army in 1967, Leonid Rozenberg carried the banner at the head of the semi-annual military parade in the city of Lugansk, in what is now Ukraine, with hundreds of fellow soldiers marching behind him and thousands of spectators cheering him on. Although highly decorated – his chest was covered in medals – the honor of leading the parade was tainted for Leonid. During his 26 years in the Soviet military Leonid was never promoted beyond the rank of lieutenant colonel. The reason? He was a Jew.
/ Tuesday, October 5, 2021
This lecture is part of the series "Hidden Archives - Public Sturggles: Events Commemorating the 75th Anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising." Presented by Doheny Memorial Library and co-sponsored by the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research.
cagr / Friday, February 2, 2018
The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research organized a symposium in the Fall to honor the work of leading Holocaust scholar David Cesarani from Great Britain, who died just weeks after being named by the USC Shoah Foundation the inaugural Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence. These are the remarks made by Rob Rozett at the event.
cagr / Wednesday, February 1, 2017
UNESCO’s push is part of a wider effort to address rising incidents of antisemitic events, which in recent years have ranged from online hate speech to physical violence.
antiSemitism, unesco, stronger than hate, CATT, Countering Antisemitism / Friday, June 1, 2018
One feature of her research is examining the role of the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive interviews in the construction of social memory of the Holocaust in the Soviet Jewish community and more widely in the post-Soviet society. During her month-long residency at the Center, Rebrova examined some of the USC Shoah Foundation’s institutional records about the selection, training, and methodology of interviewers in Russia.
cagr / Thursday, December 14, 2017
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.
/ Monday, January 9, 2017
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.
/ Thursday, December 17, 2020
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.
/ Thursday, May 23, 2002
USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research staff will be traveling around the world this summer to host academic workshops about the Visual History Archive.
visual history archive / Thursday, May 25, 2017

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