Olena Bezhan

Fellows from Ukraine (11/2022-12/2022)

The Holocaust Phenomenon in Art and Literature

In 2002 Jonathan Safran Foer published his first novel Everything is Illuminated where he reinvents a trip to his family roots in nowadays Ukraine, the book became a bestseller and was turned into a movie – the scene was set for an encounter of American and Ukrainian Holocaust literature. This project is dedicated to study phenomenon of the Holocaust in literary texts of the late 20th to the first decades of the 21st century, focusing on American, late Soviet and contemporary works. These literary representations of the Holocaust open a space to research concepts of trauma and memory, the problem of anti-Semitism and question of self-identity in a comparative perspective.

Olena Bezhan is an associate professor, lecturer of the National Odessa Mechnikov University at the Department of Foreign Literature, Faculty of Romance and Germanic Philology. She is a literary critic who published on Holocaust literature, and comparative works on the study of this phenomenon in American and late Soviet literature. Her scientific interests include American literature, comparative studies, Holocaust literature, and Anglo-American drama.

Galyna Fesenko

Fellows from Ukraine (12/2023-03/2024)

Holocaust Memory in Ukraine: Discourses of the Urban Memorial Landscapes

The project focuses on examining the key memorial transformations that took place on the sites of the Holocaust in Ukrainian cities from the end of the Nazi occupation to the present, as well as to analyse the extent to which these territories have become places of Holocaust memory. The project aims to describe the mechanisms of embedding this memory into the symbolic space cities (Dnipro, Kharkiv, Odesa). These cities were chosen for the study because they are the most sensitive to Holocaust memorial culture and public Holocaust museums function here. This is remarkable, since there is still no national Holocaust Museum in Ukraine. The project justifies the need to apply cultural analysis to each place of memory.

Galyna Fesenko, PD, Dr.Sc., Professor at the Department of History and Cultural Science at O.M. Beketov National University of Urban Economy in Kharkiv (Ukraine). A specialist in cultural urbanism, memory politics, gender studies, she has published extensively on these topics with a comparative focus on Ukraine and East-Central Europe. In recent years her research interests include genocide, searching for relevant approaches to the Holocaust memorial landscape (at the Institute of Culture Studies and Theatre History of the Austrian Academy of Sciences).

Roman Shliakhtych

Fellows from Ukraine (03/2024-05/2024)

Involvement of Local Police in the Holocaust on the Territory of the Southeast of Ukraine (On the Example of Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhia and Kherson Regions)

Research of the participation of local policemen in the Holocaust has been neglected by Ukrainian historians for a long time. It was assumed that only the Nazis committed crimes in the occupied territories. These crimes were indeed initiated by the Nazis, but their scale would have been much smaller without the participation of local perpetrators. This project involves researching the participation of local policemen in the Holocaust. The project methodology is a history from below. It is planned to show the activities of the local auxiliary police through the eyes of the police, as well as of eyewitnesses and people who managed to escape. Such an approach will reveal behavior patterns of criminals, their victims, and outside observers. It will also make it possible to understand the motives of criminals, as well as to reconstruct the crimes themselves. It is also planned to involve the methods of social psychology for a more complete reconstruction of the functioning of the collective of local police officers and the relations within such a collective.

Roman Shliakhtych was born in Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine. In 2006 he finished his MA as Teacher of History and Law at the Kryvyi Rih State Pedagogical University. In 2011 he received his Candidate degree in History (equivalent to a Ph.D) at the National University of "Kyiv-Mohyla Academy", Ukraine. Since 2021 he is a docent at the Department of Social-Humanitarian Science at the State University of Economy and Technology, Kryvyi Rih. Shliakhtych is the author of two monographs and published more than 40 studies in professional publications. Since 2014, he has been researching the participation of local policemen in the Holocaust on the territory of the Reichskommissariat "Ukraine". During this time, he was a fellow at leading Holocaust research centers such as Yad Vashem, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Yahad-In Unum, etc. Since 2023 he is a doctoral student of the Dnipro National University named after O. Honchara

Dmytro Mykhailychenko

Fellows from Ukraine (05/2024-08/2024)

Kharkiv Jewish Economist Scholars in the First Half of the 20th Century

The project aims to the Kharkiv Jewish economist scholars in the first half of the 20th century. It has a dual objective; firstly, it includes formation of research databases and a series of biographical studies; secondly, it involves a comparative study of the lives, academic carriers, and scientific methodologies in the regional and global context. At the beginning of the 20th century, talented Jewish youth in the Russian Empire actively entered higher education. Despite restrictive quotas and violent chauvinist campaigns, they became prominent theorists and researchers, even in such a scientific and academic centre as Kharkiv, capital of the Soviet Ukraine from 1919 to 1934. Nevertheless, this rapid development was tragically brought down by the Stalinist repressions, and the Holocaust. In a broader perspective, this project contributes to the study of Jewish economists’ integration into the world elite of economic science in the period under review.

Dmytro Mykhailychenko holds a Ph.D. in History and is an Associate Professor of Political Economy at Simon Kuznets Kharkiv National University of Economics. His research interests embrace the history of economics and economic thought in Ukraine. He is the author of biographical studies of twentieth century Jewish economists in Kharkiv, namely the 1971 Nobel Laureate in Economics Simon Kuznets and the architect of the 1965 Economic Reform in the USSR Yevsei Liberman, economic science and education.

Nadiia Skokova

Fellows from Ukraine (09/2022-10/2022)

Out of the Urban Roots: The Rural Jews on the Dawn of Modern Politics in East Galicia

The project will extend the understanding of Galizianer, the historical phenomenon which described the Galician Jews whose identity was formed under the Habsburg rule and lost most of its adherents in the Holocaust. Galicia was the region where the Jewish population formed one of the largest Jewish communities in the world with its own specific dynamics. Therefore, the goal of my project is to analyse the phenomenon of rural Jews as a significant part of local national representation.
Based on this goal, I want to confront the central problems of understanding what the traditional Jewish society was. Undermining the history from this perspective I want to reconstruct everyday life of Jews outside their common environment, the shtetls. On the one hand, it reveals to us how rural Jews remained the important ties with religious practices, and on the other hand it shows the multiple ways in which modern politics spread within the Jewish community. Regarding the context, my project will also reveal the level of Jewish-Ukrainian co-existence in the Sub-Carpathian region since the end of the 19th century. It seeks to analyse the social and economic environment of coexistence in the region and rethink the political discourses that made the ethnic antagonism the main feature of national misunderstanding.

Nadiia Skokova is a historian of Modern East and Central Europe at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv with a special interest in issues of mass politics, social changes in modern age, minority politics and cultural transformations. Her Ph.D. thesis is dedicated to the subject of the national and modern transformation of Galician Jews in the interwar period (title: The East Galician Zionist Federation (1918-1929).

Viktoria Soloschenko

Fellows from Ukraine (08/2022-09/2022)

Confiscations and Traces of Cultural Property of Ukrainian Jews During the Holocaust 

There is still a need for a thorough and multifaceted analysis of the problem of the spoliation of Jewish cultural property during the occupation of Eastern Europe. The looting of Ukrainian Jews during the Holocaust was both officially ordered as well as carried out by private individuals. This concerns those collections and individual items that were expropriated from their legitimate owners during the National Socialist era.
The Holocaust in the East was a violent model that differs fundamentally from the history of the Holocaust in Western Europe. Did some of these cultural objects also belong to Ukrainian Jewish families? Under what pressure were they confiscated? In order to find confiscated cultural property and its owners or successors, it is central to work out the dimensions of the problem.

Viktoria Soloshenko holds a PhD in contemporary history and is deputy director of the Institute of World History of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. She has held fellowships at the Centre for Historical Research Berlin of the Polish Academy of Sciences (September 2015), the Central Institute for Art History in Munich (Winter Academy, February 2016), the German-Ukrainian Historical Commission (DUHK) at Ludwig Maximilian University (September to October 2017), the Herder Institute for Historical Research on Eastern and Central Europe in Marburg (December 2018), the Institute of Contemporary History (November to December 2021) and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Washington (July 2021).
Her research fields include Nazi looted art, restitution, the Holocaust in Ukraine, and Ukrainian-German cultural relations from the mid-20th to the beginning of the 21st century. Her current research topic focuses on Nazi looted art with a special emphasis on "Confiscations and Traces of Cultural Assets of Ukrainian Jews during the Holocaust".