Staff Reports | Happenings & Events
The Arizona Jewish Historical Society is hosting its third annual Oskar Knoblauch Holocaust Impact Video Creator Contest, which will collect entries from Arizona high school students from now through March 28, 2025.
High school students are encouraged to create a 3-4-minute video using the story of an Arizona Holocaust survivor to educate viewers about the Holocaust, AJHS representatives tell the Digital Free Press.
“This contest does a great job of helping the student to understand, remember, and apply what was learned from a local survivor. Students’ synthesis and analyze testimonies, then creatively become solution-based thinkers, which occasionally adheres to a greater call to action, provided by the survivor,” said Tony Fusco, associate director of Holocaust Programming at AZJHS.
AZJHS provides training and materials for educators, including a $500 cash stipend for those who participate in the training and have at least one student submit an entry. Professional educator training will also be available to teachers for free 6 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 4, 2025, via a virtual Zoom meeting.
The top three videos in group and individual categories will be given cash prizes and a copy of Oskar Knoblauch’s book “A Boy’s Story, Man’s Memory.”
The AZJHS Oskar Knoblauch YouTube Competition will accept entries from Arizona students in grades 9-12.
All entries may include one or more of the following criteria: Role Playing/Acting, Oral Presentation, Poetry, Music/Performance, Interview, or Art/Photography. Each entry must include a portion of an oral history from the provided collections.
There are individual and group categories. All qualifying work will be reviewed by a panel of judges composed of Holocaust educators.
In the contest’s inaugural year, there were a total of 18 entries in the group and individual categories. The students produced meaningful and educational videos that created an experience of empathetic understanding.
