George Lucas Honored at $3.5 Million Shoah Foundation Gala
2016 Honorees: From left, Harrison Ford and Steven Spielberg stand with honorees Mellody Hobson and George Lucas. Image by Getty Images
LOS ANGELES – Encouraged by members of Hollywood royalty, 700 guests at the Ambassadors for Humanity gala contributed some $3.5 million for the far-reaching work of the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation.
Following the impact of Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List,” the director established the Shoah Foundation in 1994. A signature achievement of its global outreach is the video testimony of more than 54,000 survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust, now expanded to those who experienced genocides in Armenia, Nanking, Rwanda and Guatemala.
Sharing the spotlight with Spielberg at Thursday night’s event were actor Harrison Ford; the evening’s honorees, filmmaker and entrepreneur George Lucas and his wife Mellody Hobson; British comedian James Corden; composer John Williams conducting a full orchestra; and a dinner catered by Chef Wolfgang Puck at the Dolby Ballroom in Hollywood.
Hobson, a Chicago-based finance and education guru, praised the Shoah Foundation for “giving a face to the faceless,” and observing that in America “we are frozen in time, waiting to see what happens.”
Despite the Shoah Foundation’s impressive accomplishments, founder Spielberg, pointing to the endless slaughter in Syria, said “We have not come far enough,” following up with a clarion call, “There can be no more bystanders.”
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
