USC Shoah Foundation Institute brings Visual History to the Classroom in Russia

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
August 15, 2006

Talia Cohen
USC Shoah Foundation Institute
University of Southern California
213-740-6036

Ilya Altman
Russian Research and Educational
Holocaust Center center@holofond.ru

In July, the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education, in partnership with the Russian Research and Educational Holocaust Center, convened its pilot international workshop for educators on the use of Visual History in the Classroom.

Ilya Altman, Co-Chairman of the Russian Research and Educational Holocaust Center, jointly with the USC Shoah Foundation Institute’s staff, recruited five educators from geographically diverse areas in Russia: Elena Belenkaya from Moscow, Mikhail Goldenberg from Petrozavodsk, Svetlana Gorbacheva from Kaliningrad, Irina Lapina from St. Petersburg, and Elena Shakhova from Vladimir. Those recruited teach high school and university students across a variety of disciplines including history, conflict mediation, and psychology.

The workshop presented the educators with the opportunity to explore the Institute’s Visual History Archive. More than 7,000 Russian-language testimonies are contained within the archive; workshop participants searched through these testimonies for specific topics related to their areas of interest and the subject matter of their classes. Then, they began incorporating testimony into their existing lessons and creating new lessons based on the testimonies. They plan tointegrate the use of testimony in their teaching for the Spring 2007 semester, at which time the pilot will be evaluated.

“We have been working with the Institute for more than ten years,” explained Ilya Altman. “One of the projects on which we collaborated was the documentary, Children of the Abyss. For this journey to the Institute's headquarters in Los Angeles, we chose those educators who had developed the most successful techniques of integrating this film into their lessons and were ready to share their experience and newly gained knowledge with teachers in their region to spread word about the Institute's mission. The USC Shoah Foundation Institute's archive is unique, offering enormous possibilities for Russian teachers, and we hope that more educators get to know and benefit from it.”

“It is important for the USC Shoah Foundation Institute not only to collect Russian-language testimonies, but also to make them available for students in Russia. We feel that Russian educators are the right people to deliver those testimonies; this workshop provided an opportunity for five outstanding educators to work with the archive and determine the best way to incorporate visual history in the classroom” said Doug Greenberg, executive director of the Institute.

The Visual History in the Classroom workshop was made possible with generous donations from The Schaeffer Family Foundation, Anne Feeley and Jonathan Zimmerman, and The Henry M. Jackson Foundation.

About USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education
With a collection of nearly 52,000 video testimonies collected in 32 languages and 56 countries, the USC Shoah Foundation Institute’s 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 Sinti survivors (Gypsy), survivors of Eugenics policies, and war crimes trials participants.

The testimonies in the Institute’s archive are essential primary sources for scholarship and education. Like all such collections, their effective use depends upon a community of researchers and teachers prepared to exploit them to advance research and education. To this end, the USC Shoah Foundation Institute creates educational products for the classroom that incorporate testimony, including lessons, activities, screenings, and online exhibits; currently, these products are reaching nearly two million students in the United States and around the world.

Today, the USC Shoah Foundation Institute is engaged in the urgent mission to overcome prejudice, intolerance, and bigotry–and the suffering they cause–through the educational use of the Institute’s visual history testimonies. The Institute relies upon a global network of partners to provide the general public with broad access to the archive, and develop and support educational programs and products based on the Institute’s testimonies. For information about the USC Shoah Foundation Institute, visit www.usc.edu/vhi.

About the Russian Research and Educational Holocaust Center
The RREHC, founded in 1991, aims at preserving the memory of Holocaust victims living in the former USSR by collecting their memoirs and testimonies – on the basis of these personal experiences museums and exhibitions are created and monuments erected. Furthermore, the raising of awareness in Russian society is a key objective, be it through the organisation of commemorative events, by lobbying to include the topic of the Holocaust in school and university curricula or organising Holocaust history trainings for teachers.

This teacher training programme, including seminars in cooperation with Yad Vashem and Living Forum (Sweden), has proved to be a very successful initiative of the Center, meeting interest in the teaching community. It has made it possible for more than 3,000 teachers to get a deep historical knowledge of the Holocaust and present it to their pupils and colleagues. Additionally, an international contest for students and teachers is organised annually (since 2001), requiring participants to carry out research and write essays on their findings. The last (fourth) contest saw more than 500 works submitted from 10 countries for judging, with the winners honoured during a memorial event, organised by the Center, on the occasion of the 61st anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

Another part of the Center’s mission is to help to specifically research the Holocaust that occurred on the territory of the former Soviet Union. To this end, some 30 books have been published and another such project, an “Encyclopaedia of the Holocaust in the USSR” is on its way. For more information about the Russian Holocaust Center, see www.holofond.ru.