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. The foundation has had some notable employees, such as Jenna Blum, who later wrote the bestselling Shoah-related novel Those Who Save Us.