A gift by longtime USC Shoah Foundation board member Mickey Shapiro will fund an endowed research fellowship program at the institute’s Center for Advanced Genocide Research, it was announced Monday.
The Shoah Foundation did not disclose the amount of the gift given by Shapiro in honor of his parents, who both survived the Holocaust.
The Sara and Asa Shapiro Annual Holocaust Testimony Scholar and Lecture Fund will enable one senior scholar to spend up to one month in residence at USC Shoah Foundation’s Center for Advanced Genocide Research.
The fellowship is only available through an invitation by staff at the center, in consultation with its Faculty Advisory Council.
The fellowship, which replaces the USC Shoah Foundation Yom Hashoah Scholar in Residency, offers fellows the opportunity to use the Holocaust and genocide resources at USC.
The USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive contains more than 53,000 testimonies of witnesses and survivors of the Holocaust, including Sara Shapiro’s account.
The archive also includes testimonies from the Armenian Genocide, the Rwandan Tutsi Genocide and the Nanjing Massacre. Testimonies from survivors of the Cambodian and Guatemalan genocides will be integrated in 2016.
Selected fellows will also have access to private papers of Jewish emigrants from the Third Reich via the Special Collections of USC Doheny Memorial Library, and the Holocaust and Genocide Studies Collection at the USC Doheny Library.
As part of the fellowship, the scholar will give a public lecture at USC on his or her research.
The center’s director, Wolf Gruner, said Shapiro’s “generous gift will allow us to deepen the work we do to advance the field of genocide studies by bringing the most prominent and innovative senior scholars to the center.”
Past Yom Hashoah Scholar recipients include prominent Jewish studies scholar Yehuda Bauer and Wendy Lower, author of “Hitler’s Furies.”
USC Shoah Foundation Executive Director Stephen D. Smith said Mickey Shapiro “has been a tireless supporter of our mission. In addition to this latest gift, he also finds time to serve on USC Shoah Foundation’s executive committee and is a member of our newly formed committee to combat anti- Semitism.”
—Staff and wire reports