USC Shoah Foundation Institute
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| Motto | Dedicated to making audio-visual interviews with survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides a compelling voice for education and action |
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| Founded | 1994 by Steven Spielberg in the United States |
| Type | Research and Education Institute of the University of Southern California |
| Headquarters | University of Southern California |
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Key people
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Stephen D. Smith (Executive Director) Stephen A. Cozen (Chair) |
| Website | sfi |
Stephen D. Smith (Executive Director)
USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education, formerly Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, is a nonprofit organization dedicated to making audio-visual interviews with survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides a compelling voice for education and action. It was established by Steven Spielberg in 1994, one year after completing his Academy Award-winning film Schindler's List. The original aim of the Institute 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.
In January 2006, the Foundation partnered with and relocated to the University of Southern California and was renamed the USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education.
The Foundation conducted nearly 52,000 video testimonies between 1994 and 1999, and currently has over 53,000 testimonies. The bulk of the video testimonies expound on the Holocaust, including such experiences as Jewish Survivors, Rescuers and Aid-Providers, Sinti and Roma Survivors, Liberators, Political Prisoners, Jehovah’s Witness Survivors, War Crimes Trial Participants, Eugenic Policies Survivors, Non-Jewish Forced Laborers and Homosexual Survivors.
The vast majority of the testimonies contain a complete personal history of life before, during, and after the interviewee’s firsthand experience with genocide.
The testimonies are preserved in the Visual History Archive, one of the largest digital collections of its kind in the world. The Visual History Archive is digitized, fully searchable via indexed keywords, and hyperlinked to the minute. With more than 112,000 hours of testimony stored in the Archive, indexing technology is essential for enabling users to pinpoint topics of interest. Indexing allows students, teachers, professors, researchers and others around the world to retrieve entire testimonies or search for specific sections within testimonies through a set of nearly 64,000 keywords and phrases,1.8 million names, and 695,000 images. Each testimony is indexed by a native speaker and each minute of video is timecoded in English to a proprietary search engine using Institute-patented technology. They average a little over two hours each in length and were conducted in 63 countries and 41 languages.
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