USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education
Mission Statement
To overcome prejudice, intolerance, and bigotry--and the suffering they cause--through the educational use of the Foundation's visual history testimonies.
 Visit the Rice Only Section of the Site for Information on accessing the archive (viewable only from a connection to the Rice network).
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Background
"Following the pioneering example of Yale University’s Fortunoff Video Archive, Steven Spielberg established Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation in 1994 to collect the testimonies of survivors and other eyewitnesses to the Holocaust. The Fortunoff Archive, founded in 1979 as the Holocaust Survivors Film Project, has had a permanent home at Yale since 1981 and has collected 4,200 testimonies. This represents10,000 hours of video testimony with survivors of the Holocaust, many of whom have since died and whose memories of their experiences would have been lost to formal scholarship. Spielberg provided the initial funding of the Shoah Foundation Archive to expand upon the Yale example." 1
Today the archive is housed at USC and has been established as the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education. With a collection of nearly 52,000 video testimonies in 32 languages and from 56 countries, the archive is the largest visual history archive in the world. The Institute interviewed Jewish survivors, homosexual survivors, Jehovah's Witness survivors, liberators and liberation witnesses, political prisoners, rescuers and aid providers, Roma and Sinit survivors (Gypsy), survivors of Eugenics policies, and war crimes trials participants.
Faculty members who are interested in the integration of the archive with their courses should contact shoah@rice.edu.
1 From the Mellon Foundation grant
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