USC Shoah Foundation Institute For Visual History and Education

USC Shoah Foundation Institute For Visual History And Education

The USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education, formerly Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, is a nonprofit organization established by Steven Spielberg in 1994, one year after completing the Academy Award-winning film Schindler's List. The original aim of the Foundation was to record testimonies of survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust (which in Hebrew is called the Shoah) as a collection of videotaped interviews.

The Foundation conducted nearly 52,000 interviews between 1994 and 1999. Interviewees included Jewish survivors, homosexual survivors, Jehovah's Witness survivors, liberators and liberation witnesses, political prisoners, rescuers and aid providers, Roma and Sinti (Gypsy) survivors, survivors of Eugenics policies, and war crimes trials participants.

In January 2006, the Foundation partnered with and relocated to the University of Southern California and was renamed the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education. Its mission is "to overcome prejudice, intolerance, and bigotry - and the suffering they cause - through the educational use of the Institute's visual history testimonies."

The Institute works within USC and with partners around the world to advance scholarship and research (for example with the Austrian Holocaust Memorial Service), to provide resources and online tools for educators, and to disseminate the testimonies in its archive for educational purposes. In addition to preserving the testimonies, the Institute helps document the stories of survivors and other witnesses of other genocides. Currently, the Institute is working with the Rwandan organization IBUKA to begin a project to collect testimony from survivors of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda that claimed as many as one million lives. Once collected and indexed, the testimony will be incorporated into the Visual History Archive, which contains all testimony previously collected by the Institute.

Read more about USC Shoah Foundation Institute For Visual History And Education:  Research, Education, Global Access, Board of Councilors, Founding Executive Directors, Founding Advisory Committee, Executive Staff

Famous quotes containing the words foundation, institute, visual, history and/or education:

    The foundation of empire is art & science. Remove them or degrade them, & the empire is no more. Empire follows art & not vice versa as Englishmen suppose.
    William Blake (1757–1827)

    Whenever any form of government shall become destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, & to institute new government, laying it’s foundation on such principles & organising it’s powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety & happiness.
    Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)

    To write well, to have style ... is to paint. The master faculty of style is therefore the visual memory. If a writer does not see what he describes—countrysides and figures, movements and gestures—how could he have a style, that is originality?
    Rémy De Gourmont (1858–1915)

    American time has stretched around the world. It has become the dominant tempo of modern history, especially of the history of Europe.
    Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978)

    He was the product of an English public school and university. He was, moreover, a modern product of those seats of athletic exercise. He had little education and highly developed muscles—that is to say, he was no scholar, but essentially a gentleman.
    H. Seton Merriman (1862–1903)