JFCS San Francisco’s Day of Learning to Feature Testimony Workshop

Students and teachers from all over the Bay Area will attend a workshop about USC Shoah Foundation testimony and IWitness at Jewish Family and Children’s Services (JFCS) of San Francisco’s annual Day of Learning on Sun., March 23.

Day of Learning: Voices of Youth will be held at Galileo High School in San Francisco from 12:30 – 5 p.m. and is open to all students and teachers – last year it drew 600 attendees from 100 schools all over California. The registration deadline is March 16.

At the JFCS Day of Learning, students attend workshops on topics such as “Hitler Youth in Nazi Germany,” “Genocide in the Sudan,” and “Poetry during and after the Holocaust.” Teachers’ workshops are “Teaching about Propaganda, Political Cartoons, and the Art of Arthur Szyk,” “Teaching about Armed Resistance in the Holocaust,” and “New Perspectives in Thinking, Learning, and Teaching about the Holocaust.”

Every workshop includes a talk by a Holocaust survivor.

USC Shoah Foundation’s workshop is “Their Stories Matter: Working with Survivor Testimony.” The workshop will focus on the testimonies of survivors who were children or young adults during the Holocaust and get participants to consider how they help us to understand world events, and how their experiences are universal and relevant to the youth of today. Participants will construct multimedia projects in IWitness, USC Shoah Foundation’s interactive multimedia website.

USC Shoah Foundation recently acquired 1,400 testimonies of Holocaust survivors from the JFCS Holocaust Center’s Oral History Project. They are currently being indexed and will be incorporated into the Visual History Archive by the end of 2015. High school-age participants in JFCS’s Manovill Holocaust History Fellowship each year complete a video project using testimony from the Visual History Archive.