Shoah Foundation

Shoah foundations are organizations that are formed to further the remembrance of the Shoah of World War II. There are currently two major foundations that are internationally active.

Major Shoah Foundations

In 1994, Steven Spielberg founded the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education, originally called the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, a nonprofit organization established to record testimonies in video format of survivors and other witnesses of the Shoah. Between 1994 and 1999, the Foundation conducted nearly 52,000 interviews in 56 countries and in 32 languages. Interviewees included Jewish survivors, Jehovah's Witness survivors, homosexual survivors, liberators and liberation witnesses, political prisoners, rescuers and aid providers, Roma and Sinti survivors, survivors of Eugenics policies, and war crimes trials participants. On September 20, 2005, the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation and the University of Southern California (USC), where Spielberg had long been a Trustee, entered into an agreement to transfer the net assets and control over the Foundation's Board of Directors to USC in return for the guarantee of the preservation of the archive in perpetuity and the accommodation to continue the Foundation's mission.[1] The foundation has had some notable employees, such as Jenna Blum, who later wrote the bestselling Shoah-related novel Those Who Save Us.[2]

Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah was formed in 2000, with recovered money from the property taken from French Jews during World War II. The Foundation’s mission is to support projects in all areas of history and research into the Shoah, education and transmission, memory, solidarity and Jewish culture.[3] The Foundation is often represented internationally by their Présidente d’honneur, Mme. Simone Veil, a survivor of the Auschwitz II who later became the first directly elected President of the European Parliament.

The DNA Shoah Project has started a genetic database of people whose family members - grandparents, aunts, cousins - were victims of the Shoah. The Shoah Project aims to collect at least 10,000 samples and has been traveling throughout the United States collecting DNA swabs from Shoah survivors.[4] Although it currently only has 1,000 samples, the Project is intended to reunite living family members and eventually help identify remains which may still lie in anonymous graves throughout Europe.

References

  1. ↑ Return of Organization Exempt From Income Tax (Form 990). Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. Calendar Year 2005.
  2. ↑ Elaine Durbach, November 11, 2007, New Jersey Jewish News, Author's roots yield best-selling novel, Accessed Feb. 2, 2014, “...Born of a Jewish father and a German mother, she grew up in the United States...”
  3. ↑ Who We Are. The Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah Web Site
  4. ↑ DNA May Track Down Shoah Survivors In Houston And Elsewhere, Houston Press, April 20, 2009.

External links

Coordinates: 34°01′14″N 118°17′00″W / 34.02056°N 118.28333°W / 34.02056; -118.28333

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