Aurelia Kalisky

Gerda Henkel-Research Fellow (11/2023 – 03/2024)

How Do We Write Our History? The Unclassifiable Historiography of Jewish Survivors after the Shoah

The project focuses on the works and careers of a group of authors, the "survivor scholars". It examines forms of scholarly inquiry and knowledge production undertaken by Jewish Holocaust survivors until the mid-1980s. These were driven by the common goal of documenting the catastrophe and writing its history. Apart from the differences between their approaches, they developed independent historiographical forms that seem all the more valuable because they anticipate recent reflections on the historiography of the Shoah and on the need for an interdisciplinary development of Holocaust studies and historiography in general.

Aurelia Kalisky, literary scholar, Fellow at the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin since 2021, supported by the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah. Numerous articles on testimony, testimonial literature, politics of memory and historiography in the context of genocidal violence, especially the Shoah and the genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda.

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Katharina Lenski

Gerda Henkel-Research Fellow (10/2023 – 03/2024)

"Asociality": Constructing "Underclasses" between 1933 and 1989

"Asociality" is rarely addressed in historiography, although it has been scandalised not only in Germany since the 19th century. Since the proclamation of the welfare state, anyone who did not conform to the common patterns of working and living was under general suspicion of being a "social parasite". The writing of history has constructional nature of "asociality", so that its functions have remained unclear. In the literature, the thesis can be found that "asociality" served to constitute an "underclass" and thereby and thus to define the "inner boundaries" of society. In this context the action samples of the institutions and individuals involved as a reconstructed as social practice. The project spans the period from the beginning of the Nazi regime to the end of the GDR dictatorship.

Katharina Lenski, historian, sociologist and education scientist at the University of Jena. Co-founder and Director of the Thuringian Archive for Contemporary History "Matthias Domaschk", later Fellow at the Imre-Kertész-Kolleg Jena as well as post-doctoral researcher and coordinator of the research training group "The GDR and the Dictatorships after 1945 in European Perspective".

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Konstantin Fuks

Gerda Henkel-Research Fellow (04/2025 – 08/2025)

Latvian Jews at War. Confronting the Holocaust

The project focuses on the story of the struggle for survival of Latvian Jews who fled east and joined the Soviet war effort during the Second World War. Using newly discovered sources, such as wartime letters, interviews and memoirs, the study sheds light on the reaction of local Jews to the Soviet conquest of Latvia, the decision-making process of Latvian Jews to seek refuge in the Soviet Union during the German invasion, knowledge and awareness of the mass killings of Jews in occupied Latvia among those Jews who fled into the Soviet interior, and what it meant to be a Latvian Jew and a Red Army soldier in a war of total annihilation on the Eastern Front. Situating the study in the broader context of the history of Stalinist society at war, the project aims to tell the unknown story of Jewish resistance and survival during the Holocaust.

Konstantin Fuks received his PhD in History and Jewish Studies in 2024 from the University of Toronto. His research and publications focus on the social history of the war, revolution and the Holocaust in Latvia, with an emphasis on reclaiming the untold stories of Latvians who fought on the Soviet side during the Second World War.

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Irina Nastasă-Matei

Gerda Henkel-Research Fellow (01/2025 – 06/2025)

The United Romanian Jews of America and Its Responses to Antisemitism and the Holocaust in Romania (1918–1970s)

The project aims to analyse the United Romanian Jews of America (URJA)’s roughly 60 years of activity in supporting Romanian Jews in the face of various and fluid forms of antisemitism – those from the interwar period that culminated in the Holocaust as well as the more insidious ones from the communist period. URJA documented the Romanian governments’ violations of the Jewish minority rights, negotiated with the Romanian and US authorities for their safeguarding and for conditioning financial and economic aid on fair treatment of Jews, and denounced the antisemitic laws of Octavian Goga’s government from 1937. During the Second World War it reported to the whole world on pogroms, deportations and mass murders of Romanian Jews, advocated for rescue measures, and collaborated with other Jewish aid organisations, such as the Joint Distribution Committee. The organisation remained active until the 1970s. It continued to support Romanian Jews living in the US and Israel, protested the Romanian communist regime’s mistreatment of the Jewish population, and fought to bring war criminals to justice; the most prominent case being the successful efforts of Charles Kremer – a dentist and Wiesenthal ally who had fled Romania – to denounce and expel from the US the Archbishop Valerian Trifa, a former leader of the Iron Guard.

Irina Nastasă-Matei is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Bucharest. In 2013, she concluded her PhD in history on the topic “Students from Romania in the Third Reich. 1933-1945” at Babeș-Bolyai University Cluj. She has held several fellowships, e.g. from Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich (DAAD Research Scholarship) and the German Culture Forum for Central and Eastern Europe in Munich, and directed international projects Romania’s transnational and Jewish history. She is the author of the monograph Education, Politics and Propaganda: Romanian students in Nazi Germany (in Romanian, 2016), co-author of the book Culture and Propaganda. The Romanian Institute in Berlin, 1940-1945 (with Lucian Nastasă-Kovacs, 2018 in Romanian and 2023 in German), and author of over thirty articles, including several on Jewish life in interwar Romania.

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Anastasia Felcher

Gerda Henkel-Research Fellow (10/2022 – 08/2023)

Debates on the Holocaust in Jewish Samizdat: Political Agenda, Self-Identification and Memory Work

This project aims to research the cultural afterlife of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union as ir appeared in the pages of uncensored publications, books, magazines and petitions - the so-called Jewish samizdat. The aim is to show the political and memorial functions of coming to terms with the traumatic past on the pages of banned texts on Jewish subjects. Non-conformist political and cultural-literary works of Jewish samizdat were unsystematically produced throughout the country in the late 1960s to late 1980s. These texts, distributed through unofficial channels, supported the Jewish struggle to emigrate from the Soviet Union. This research is an attempt to understand the interplay between uncensored media, Jewish nationalism and Holocaust remembrance under the restrictive conditions of Soviet state policy, memory politics and the cult of victory during World War II.

Anastasia Felcher , historian and cultural heritage researcher. PhD 2016 in Cultural Heritage Management and Development at the Scuola IMT Alto Studi Lucca. Since 2020, archivist for the Slavic collection at the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives at the Central European University in Budapest, where she researched Slavic, Jewish and Samizdat collections.

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Marta Havryshko

Gerda Henkel – Research Fellow (2/2021 – 9/2021)

War on Women’s Bodies. Sexual Violence during the Holocaust in Ukraine

Sexual violence was one of the most horrific parts of women’s everyday lives during the Holocaust. This research project analyses the causes, patterns, dynamics, and consequences of sexual violence against Jewish women and girls during the Shoah in Ukraine using a gender approach. The main questions under consideration include: Was sexual violence a by-product or rather a tool of genocide? How and why could rape be considered an instrument of terror, humiliation, punishment, revenge, dehumanisation, demonstrating power, bonding among perpetrators, and constructing gender roles? What is sexual about sexual violence in the Holocaust? The project analyses how cultural ideas and discourses about the body, sexuality, reproduction, and ethnic, racial, national, religious, and political identity as well as positions of power contributed to perpetrators’ motivations and strategies for sexual violence, as well as victims’/survivors’ experiences of these processes. The project seeks to create a meaningful space for Jewish women’s voices and perspectives.

Marta Havryshko is a Research Associate at the I. Krypiakevych Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Her research interests include sexual violence during the Holocaust and the Second World War, gender history, and nationalism. In 2019/20, she was a fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Her research has been supported by Yad Vashem, the German Academic Exchange Service, Yahad-In Unum, Monash University, and others.

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Emily Gioielli

Research Fellow (01/2022-08/2022)

Cataclysm: Water and the Holocaust in Central Europe, 1933–1945

“Cataclysm” is a socio-environmental history of the Holocaust in (East) Central Europe. Using water as the connecting thread, this study investigates how hybrid human-ecological processes shaped the practices, experiences, spaces and memories of violence and persecution of European Jews, and how, in turn mass death and persecution shaped the natural world. Using methods and questions from both environmental and social history, “Cataclysm” investigates four themes that were defined by the cooperation and sometimes tension between human initiative and natural processes in Central Europe: the construction of genocidal spaces and “pariah landscapes”; forced and slave labor operations in camps and ghettos; mass killing operations; and resistance and adaptation to the environments of destruction produced by the National Socialist regime and their allies across central, eastern, and southeastern Europe.

Emily Gioielli is an Assistant Teaching Professor of History in the Humanities and Arts Department at Worcester Polytechnic Institute starting in August 2021. Her research focuses on the history of violence and regime change from a transdisciplinary perspective and the history of women, gender, and sexuality in twentieth-century East Central Europe. She holds a PhD from Central European University (Budapest), and her research has been supported by Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Rockefeller Archive Center, and the Open Society Archives in Budapest.

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Kamil Kijek

Gerda Henkel –Research Fellow (03/2022-08/2022)

The Last Polish Shtetl? Jewish Community of Dzierżoniów, Jewish World, the Cold War and Communism (1945-1950)

Main goal of my research is to confront some of the central problems of post-1945 Polish Jewish, general Jewish, Polish and Cold War history from a micro-historical angle of one, small-town Jewish community. The Jewish community of Dzierżoniów provides a unique perspective in this regard, given that in July 1946 its members made up almost 50% of the inhabitants of the town, thus making the town unique on the map of post-Holocaust Europe. Through this micro-historical perspective of Dzierżoniów I am researching problems such as: Jewish transnationalism on both sides of the “Iron Courtain”, Zionism, Communism and rivalry between them, antisemitism and Polish-Jewish relations, the Jewish role and Jewish context of Polish takeover of a former German territory, where Dzierżoniów (Reichenbach) was located.

Kamil Kijek is Assistant Professor in the Jewish Studies Department at the University of Wrocław. He held various fellowships in the United States, Israel, Germany and the United Kingdom. His research interest are Central-East European Jewish History at the end of the 19. and 20. century, social and cultural theory. In 2018, he has received an international prize for his publication titled Jews and Illiberal Regimes in Eastern Europe after 1917 granted by the Leonid Nevzlin Research Center for Russian and East-European Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

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