USC Shoah Foundation has created a new leadership group to help bolster its strategic goals, programs, and activities. The Next Generation Council will be composed of community and business leaders, entertainment and media trendsetters, philanthropists, and social entrepreneurs from across the country, as well as children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors.
The Sarah and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre in Toronto has introduced USC Shoah Foundation’s online educational tool, IWitness, to Canadian teachers and students, marking the beginning of the Neuberger Centre’s use of IWitness as part of its educational programming.
On June 6, Steven Spielberg, Founder of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute, presented Robert A. Iger, Chairman and CEO of The Walt Disney Company, with the Institute’s highest honor, the Ambassador for Humanity Award. Iger was honored at the Institute’s annual gala, where he was recognized for his support of the Institute’s work, his longtime philanthropy, and his leadership role in corporate citizenship. The gala presenting sponsor was jcpenny. Jimmy Kimmel hosted, and Mary J. Blige gave a special musical performance.
The inaugural meeting of the Rwandan Peace Education Program brought together survivors of the Rwandan Tutsi Genocide and the Holocaust, along with other activists from around the world.
Representatives from more than 30 Holocaust museums and centers in the United States and Canada came to Los Angeles this week for the 2013 Association of Holocaust Organizations (AHO) Winter Seminar, hosted for the first time by USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education.
June 18 saw the U.S. premiere of a set of piano variations on a Polish patriotic theme composed in the Dachau concentration camp by prisoner of war Leon Kaczmarek (1903–1973). Kaczmarek’s composition was performed by 17-year-old pianist Nicholas Biniaz-Harris, winner of the National Symphony Orchestra’s 2013 Young Soloists’ Competition.
Testimonies of survivors and witnesses of the 1994 Rwandan Tutsi Genocide added to USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive have resulted in 500 new search terms for the archive’s indexing system.
The index is a controlled vocabulary of more than 50,000 terms that make up the Shoah Foundation’s Thesaurus and that allow detailed searching of the testimonies in the archive.
USC Shoah Foundation and the Armenian Film Foundation have announced a new joint goal: By the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide in 2015, they will integrate into the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive the more than 400 interviews of survivors of the genocide that were filmed by the late Dr. J.
A key USC Shoah Foundation partner’s mission of upgrading public school access to broadband Internet has earned a boost from President Obama. The nonprofit organization EducationSuperHighway works to ensure that every K-12 school in the nation has the necessary capacity to fully leverage the possibilities offered by digital education and online learning. EducationSuperHighway’s advocacy was instrumental in the president’s announcement of ConnectED, an initiative to connect 99 percent of U.S. students to high-speed Internet within the next five years.
The Swedish Embassy today announced funding for an ambitious new Rwanda-wide peace-building program. The Rwanda Peace Education Programme is designed to counter behavioral risk factors for genocide by promoting social cohesion, pluralism, personal responsibility, empathy, critical thinking and action to build a more peaceful society.