Kim Kardashian raises Genocide awareness at Shoah Foundation Gala

The USC Shoah Foundation awarded President Barack Obama with the Ambassadors For Humanity distinction at its 20th anniversary gala in Los Angeles.

Among the approximately 1,300 guests was Kim Kardashian, who was in attendance to raise awareness for the Armenian Genocide.

Obama has failed to recognize and use the word genocide during his presidency as he once said.

"I am here because I have been really passionate about getting people to acknowledge the Armenian genocide," said Kardashian.

"The foundation here has acknowledged 400 Armenian genocide survivors and gotten their testimony, and I'm really proud of that. So, I'm here to represent the Armenians."

She continued: "I met an amazing woman tonight who is a 100-year-old survivor and she lived at the same home where my grandparents lived ... it was an honor to meet her."

The amazing women Kardashian spoke of and took photos with was one Yevnique Salibian, a centenarian and genocide survivor.

The USC Shoah Foundation has digital archives that soon will include the filmed testimonies of 400 Armenian Genocide eyewitnesses and survivors.

In April 2010, the Armenian Film Foundation and founder J. Michael Hagopian, along with his wife, Antoinette, entered into an agreement with the USC Shoah Foundation to license the 400 Armenian Genocide testimonies filmed by Hagopian to Shoah’s Visual History Archive.

"The voices of those recorded and unrecorded, those who survived and those who perished, call upon us, implore us and challenge us to turn 'never forget' to 'never again,'" said the President.

"The testimonies of survivors like those with us tonight also remind us that the purpose of memory is not simply to preserve the past, it is to protect the future."

Shoah’s Visual History Archive is the largest digital collection of its kind in the world, with 105,000 hours of video testimony.

The collection is available at 44 institutions around the world, and approximately one million students, researchers, teachers and lay people view the testimonies every year.

In addition, thousands of high school students across the country can view the testimonies through IWitness, the Shoah Foundation Institute’s educational website that makes 1,300 full life histories and testimonies of survivors of genocides from the Visual History Archive available to secondary students so they can create multimedia projects and complete interactive activities.