Online Conference: Jewish Childhood in Eastern Europe

Yehoshua Ecker

Professor of early modern and modern Jewish history at Bud Shorstein Center for Jewish Studies, University of Florida, Gainesville, the Graduate School of Jewish Studies, Touro University, New York

Yehoshua Ecker teaches early modern and modern Jewish history at the Bud Shorstein Center for Jewish Studies, University of Florida, Gainesville, and at the Graduate School of Jewish Studies, Touro University, New York. His fields of research include local histories, elites, diasporas, and networks in imperial and post-imperial contexts. His work has focused on Jewish Ottoman elites and networks, and on Jewish localities and elites in Habsburg and Polish Galicia.

Title of session: The Jewish Galician countryside experience from a child’s perspective

Jan Rybak

Alfred Landecker Lecturer at Central European University’s Jewish Studies and Nationalism Studies Programs in Vienna

Jan Rybak is Alfred Landecker Lecturer at Central European University’s Jewish Studies and Nationalism Studies Programs in Vienna. He holds a PhD from the European University Institute in Florence and has previously worked at the University of York and at the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism in London. He is the author of Everyday Zionism in East-Central Europe: Nation-Building in War and Revolution, 1914–1920 (2021) which won the 2023 book prize of the British and Irish Association for Jewish Studies.

Title of session: Refugee Children into Pillars of the Nation: Zionist Care Work for Galician Jewish Refugee Children in WW1 Vienna

Ula Madej-Krupitski

Assistant Professor in the Department of Jewish Studies at McGill University in Montréal, Canada

Ula Madej-Krupitski is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Jewish Studies at McGill University in Montréal, Canada. She received her PhD in history at the University of California, Berkeley in 2020. She is currently working on her book manuscript entitled Jews on Holiday: Leisure Travel and Identity in the Interwar Poland.  

Title of session: Polish Jewish Youth Encounters the ‘Other’ while Vacationing in the Second Polish Republic

Joanna Śliwa

historian at Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference)

Joanna Sliwa is a historian at the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) where she also administers academic programs. Her research focuses on the Holocaust in Poland and modern Polish Jewish history. Her book, Jewish Childhood in Kraków: A Microhistory of the Holocaust received the 2020 Ernst Fraenkel Prize from the Wiener Holocaust Library.

Title of session: Jewish Children Seeking Help from Catholic Institutions in Kraków during the Holocaust

Anna Sternshis

Al and Malka Green Professor of Yiddish studies and director at Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto

Anna Shternshis is the Al and Malka Green Professor of Yiddish studies and director of the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923 - 1939 (2006) and When Sonia Met Boris: An Oral History of Jewish Life under Stalin (2017), and most recently co-author (together with Oleg Budnitsky, David Engel and Gennady Estraikh) of Jews in the Soviet Union: A History: War, Conquest, and Catastrophe, 1939–1945 (2022). She is currently working on a book tentatively entitled Last Yiddish Heroes: A Lost and Found Archive of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union about Yiddish music created in Nazi-occupied Ukraine. 

Title of session: Yiddish Childrens’ songs of the Holocaust in Transnistria

Boaz Cohen

Head of the Holocaust Studies Program at Western Galilee College

Boaz Cohen is the head of the Holocaust Studies Program, Western Galilee College and a Senior lecturer in History at the Shaanan College. He is an affiliated research fellow at the Centre for Collective Violence, Holocaust and Genocide Studies at UCL. His work focuses on the development of Holocaust memory and historiography in their social and cultural context and on Jewish and Israeli post-Holocaust society. He researches work with survivor children after the Holocaust, their rehabilitation and the collection of their testimonies 

Title of session: Rehabilitating Holocaust child victims in postwar Poland

Natalia Aleksiun

Harry Rich Professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Florida

Natalia Aleksiun is the Harry Rich Professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Florida, Gainesville. She has written extensively on the history of Polish Jews and the Holocaust. Her book Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust was published in 2021. She co-edited several volumes, including Entanglements of War: Social Networks during the Holocaust (2023) and Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, vol. 29: Writing Jewish History in Eastern Europe (2017). She is completing two books: on the so-called Cadaver Affair in medical schools in East Central Europe between two world wars and one on Jewish life in hiding in western Ukraine during the Holocaust.  

Title of session: Jewish childhood in Eastern Europe/the Polish lands

Christine Schmidt

Deputy Director and Head of Research at the Wiener Holocaust Library in London

Christine Schmidt is the Deputy Director and Head of Research at the Wiener Holocaust Library in London, where she oversees academic programming and partnerships. Her research has focused on the history of postwar tracing and documentation efforts, the concentration camp system, and resistance and collaboration in France and Hungary. Her current book project focuses on an archival biography of Holocaust survivor accounts recorded by the Wiener Library in the 1950s and 60s.

François Guesnet

Professor of Modern Jewish History in the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at University College London

Professor of Modern Jewish History in the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at University College London. He holds a PhD in Modern History from Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg im Breisgau, and specializes in the early modern and 19th century history of Eastern European, and more specifically, Polish Jews. He has held research and teaching fellowships at the Hebrew University Jerusalem, the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia), the University of Oxford and Dartmouth College and is co-chair of the editorial board of Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry

Antony Polonsky

Chief Historian at the Global Educational Outreach Program, POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Warsaw and Emeritus Professor of Holocaust Studies at Brandeis University

Antony Polonsky is Chief Historian of the Global Educational Outreach Program, POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Warsaw and Emeritus Professor of Holocaust Studies at Brandeis University. He is co-chair of the editorial board of Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, and the author of many published works, the most recent being The Jews in Poland and Russia, volume 1, 1350 to 1881; volume 2 1881 to 1914; volume 3 1914 to 2008 (2010, 2012), published in 2013 in an abridged version The Jews in Poland and Russia. A Short History.