The USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of Damas Gisimba, the director of a Kigali orphanage who sheltered and saved the lives of over 400 people, mostly children, during the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. Later in life, he headed the Gisimba Memorial Center, a charitable organization that provided after-school programs for disadvantaged children and served as a place of remembrance for victims of the genocide.

April 7 is the International Day of Reflection on the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda. The day of remembrance marks the start of the 100-day genocidal campaign in which an estimated 800,000 Rwandans—mainly Tutsis and moderate Hutus—were killed by well-organized mobs of Hutu extremists.

Edith Umugiraneza, a survivor of the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda who now works for USC Shoah Foundation, says false information and manipulated facts helped ignite and sustain the violence, and even today threaten to distort our understanding of events.

Hundreds of survivors of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide against the Tutsi congregated in Salt Lake City over the weekend for the largest-ever international gathering of survivors.

Organizers say the event, hosted by IBUKA-USA and supported by a number of organizations including USC Shoah Foundation, was a safe space for survivors to discuss issues including bringing genocide perpetrators to justice, preserving the memory of victims, and fighting against revisionism.

Today, October 1st, marks the day in 1990 that Rwandan Patriotic Front troops crossed into Rwanda from neighboring Uganda and the beginning of a sequence of events that culminated in the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi that claimed as many as one million lives over the course of approximately 100 days.

USC Shoah Foundation’s Rwanda Archive and Education Program, a landmark initiative in partnership with Aegis Trust and the Kigali Genocide Memorial, has been at the forefront of recording and preserving testimonies related to the genocide.

Theogene Kayitakire, a sergeant in the Rwandan Patriotic Army, helped capture the strategic high ground of the Mount Rebero neighborhood in Kigali in April 1994, just days after the Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda had begun.

With the location secure and reinforcements arriving, Theogene had a request for his command: Could he go to save his relatives nearby? When given permission, he disguised himself in a government army uniform and, with a few other soldiers, went to find his uncle. But his uncle refused to flee to safety without his neighbors.

USC Shoah Foundation has added 132 testimonies to its Visual History Archive. These firsthand accounts of mass atrocities spanning more than 100 years are now available to researchers, educators, family members, and the public.

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.

Today marks the last day of the USC Shoah Foundation’s 100 Voices to Remember Twitter project, a string of daily quotes from a different witness of the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda for each day of its duration.

The atrocities claimed as many as one million lives over the course of about 100 days in 1994, when government-backed militias of ethnic Hutus went on a mass killing spree, targeting the country’s next largest ethnic group, the Tutsis.

In her research of testimonies, USC student Virginia Bullington observed that women in the context of both the Armenian and Tutsi Rwanda genocides are often described as “bearers of culture, maternity and nationalism,” while in the Guatemalan context, “indigenous women were not essentialized -- they were erased.”