The 20th anniversary of Steven Spielberg's epic film Schindler’s List (meticulously restored under his personal supervision) will be marked with a series of special screenings to benefit the USC Shoah Foundation - The Institute for Visual History and Education.
The series will debut with a special benefit screening at the Prince Music Theater in Philadelphia on Thursday, September 12. It will be the first major film event to highlight the re-opening of the iconic venue, spearheaded and funded by The Karen & Herb Lotman Foundation. All proceeds will benefit the USC Shoah Foundation. Additional cities will be announced shortly.
“This event provides a unique opportunity to bring together the community to both remember and pay tribute to the survivors and ensure that their stories are heard, preserved and used for education,” says USC Shoah Foundation Board of Councilors Member Steve Cozen, who is chairing the event. “And its significance is greater than ever because of its coincidence with the Yom Kippur holiday on September 13.”
Tickets for the Philadelphia benefit range from $1000 to $100 for individual tickets. There are also $2500 sponsor packages available and as a gesture of tzedakah (Hebrew for charity), sponsors unable to utilize their tickets can donate them to local educators, students and others who would be interested in seeing the film.
Steven Spielberg founded the USC Shoah Foundation in 1994 after his experience making Schindler’s List. The Institute is dedicated to making audio-visual interviews with survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides a compelling voice for education and action. The Institute currently features nearly 52,000 eyewitness testimonies in its Visual History Archive (VHA) that were taken in 57 countries and 33 languages. The Visual History Archive is the largest digital collection of its kind in the world.
Philadelphia figures prominently into the work the Institute does. Continued Cozen, “It was here that we honored Brian Roberts with the Ambassadors of Humanity Award in 2011, for the work Comcast has done in making films about the Holocaust available to the public via On Demand; the University of Pennsylvania is now one of 44 sites around the world that has full research access to the Visual History Archive; and it was here that we piloted one of our newest initiatives, IWitness.”
IWitness is the Institute’s educational website, and was recently recognized as one of the “Best Websites for Teaching and Learning” by the American Association of School Librarians. The website provides students and teachers access to 1,300 testimonies for guided exploration and multimedia projects via a built-in video editor.
By integrating testimony-based education with the development of digital literacy and other 21st-century competencies, IWitness encourages critical thinking and self-reflection, and helps students get a sense of their own place in history and of the profound impact their words and actions can have on the lives of others.
For more information about the Benefit Screening, call the Benefit Line at 215-665-7208.
Source: PR Newswire
