Ita is a cataloguer and indexer of Holocaust survivors testimonies. She also worked as a translator. She is fluent in Portuguese and Spanish, as well as conversant in Yiddish. Ita Gordon trained interviewers in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, Brazil; she trains and mentors prospective cataloguers and indexers. Representing the Institute, Ita reached out to community leaders in South America, especially in Brazil, during the early phase of collecting survivor testimony.

The Fundación de Antropología Forense de Guatemala (FAFG) has collected more than 500 video interviews from Guatemalan survivors and witnesses in Guatemala. All conducted in Spanish or K’iche’, the testimonies are being preserved and indexed by USC Shoah Foundation, which began adding them to the Visual History Archive in 2016. Currently there are 32 testimonies searchable in the Visual History Archive. FAFG continues to collect and grow the Guatemalan testimonies and collection.

Anna Lee, a junior at USC from Los Angeles, California majoring in English Literature with minors in Spanish and Teaching English as a Second language (TESOL), has been chosen as the 2019 Beth and Arthur Lev Student Research Fellow at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research.

The Holocaust is not widely taught in Latin America. Few books on the subject are available in Spanish, and university classes that do touch on the history are sometimes outdated.

A public lecture by Anna Lee (USC undergraduate, English major, Spanish and TESOL minor) 2019 Beth and Arthur Lev Student Research Fellow  Deaths by guns is not unique anymore in American contemporary culture. And mass executions by guns were prevalent during the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide. In America today, mass shootings, particularly in schools, have caused devastation.

Move-in day for students at the University of Southern California this week led to a remarkable small-world moment between two strangers with ties to the Holocaust in the public-exhibit space of USC Shoah Foundation’s lobby. Fifty-eight-year-old Alexander Moissis of the San Francisco Bay Area and his wife were helping their freshman son move into a dormitory when Alexander decided to steal away for a few minutes to visit USC Shoah Foundation, which is located on campus next to the dorm.

Last week a group of us from USC Shoah Foundation were in Guatemala with our testimony partner, the Foundation for Forensic Anthropology in Guatemala (FAFG). We attended the funeral of a Mayan man whose remains were recently exhumed by FAFG – 36 years after he disappeared during the genocide there.

Anna Lee, the 2019 Beth and Arthur Lev Student Research Fellow at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, gave a public lecture about her research on survivor activism as a form of healing in the aftermath of mass executions during genocide and contemporary school mass shootings. During her one-month residency at the Center, Lee conducted comparative research on the topic by examining both survivor testimonies housed in the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive and accounts of school shootings survivors found in media and other sources.