By Reed Saxon, AP file photo The Shoah Foundation is expanding its mission to documenting survivor memories from more recent acts of genocide. "How do we make this vision a priority in communities all across the world?" Spielberg said.

After collecting 52,000 interviews, the filmmaker's unprecedented effort to record the stories of those who survived Nazi persecution during World War II is now applying the mantra "Never forget" to more recent acts of genocide and oppression.

"Now we ask ourselves: How do we make this vision a priority in communities all across the world?" Spielberg said.

The announcement came Monday night at a benefit dinner featuring Spielberg and other leaders from the Shoah organization, attended by hundreds of Hollywood power brokers.

"Our work on the Holocaust will continue. But we plan to join it now to work with others around the world," said Douglas Greenberg, executive director of the Shoah Foundation Institute at the University of Southern California. "Our commitment is to combat (violence and racism) wherever and however we can — no matter who the victims are."

Greenberg said the Shoah group has begun early discussions to enact similar programs focusing on genocide in Rwanda and Cambodia as well as stories of life under apartheid in South Africa.

"The obligation to remember is a moral responsibility that all of us owe to all of those who have suffered violence and racism in the modern world, whether they are Jews or Armenians or Cambodians or Rwandans or Darfuris," Greenberg said.

Spielberg said the Shoah Foundation was "my second career," founded "with a dream of a world where the memories of the victims of history's greatest crime could be used to teach new generations that hatred is not something we are born with, but something we acquire."

He created the foundation after finishing his Oscar-winning Schindler's List nearly 14 years ago, saying he was overwhelmed by the personal stories he heard from Holocaust survivors after the movie came out. Creating a library of those people telling their own stories would have a power he said he couldn't replicate in a movie.

Spielberg presented the Shoah Foundation's inaugural Ambassador for Humanity award to Wallis Annenberg, vice president of the philanthropic Annenberg Foundation, founded by her billionaire publishing family.

Monday night's event was hosted by Jerry Seinfeld, who brought levity to the sometimes serious proceedings. In his opening remarks he deadpanned: "It's fantastic to be here. I am Jewish ... as are my parents also."