Holocaust Studies and its Social Setting: speakers

Leo Smit Foundation

Young musicians Violetta Adamova and Lev Bogino will perform music for two violins by Dick Kattenburg (1919-1944) and Géza Frid (1904-1989). Both composers were Jewish and their music was forbidden during the Second World War. The Hungarian Géza Frid – pupil of Kodály and Bartók – was one of the key figures in the post-war Dutch music world. To escape the dictatorship of his country of origin, he fled to the Netherlands in 1927. As of 1941, Frid as a stateless Jew, was prohibited from performing in public.

Gadi Luzatto Voghera

Gadi Luzzatto Voghera Ph.D. is the Director of the Foundation CDEC in Milan and a member of the Italian delegation in IHRA. He has been a professor of Jewish history at the Boston University study abroad program in Italy and at the Ca’ Foscari University in Venice for two decades. Among his works see Antisemitismo. Domande e Risposte (Feltrinelli, 1994), Il prezzo dell’eguaglianza (FrancoAngeli, 1998), Antisemitismo a sinistra (Einaudi, 2007), Rabbini (Laterza, 2011), No distinction of race or religion.

Susanne Heim

PD Dr. Susanne Heim is a historian and a political scientist. Since 2005 she is the coordinator of the 16-volume source collection on the Holocaust "Edition Judenverfolgung 1933-1945". In 2009/2010 she carried our a guest professorship at the University of Vienna. In 2004/2005 she was Director of the research program of the Max-Planck-Society about the history of its predecessor during the Nazi era; In 2003 she did a Charles Revson Fellowship at the USHMM and in 1996/97 she was a fellow at the International Research Center for Holocaust Studies, Yad Vashem.

Anna Veronica Pobbe

Anna Veronica Pobbe is a PhD-candidate at the University of Trento. She's developing a project based on Hans Biebow's biography, the Amtsleiter of Litzmannstadt Ghetto. She attended two EHRI conferences, one in Trieste (summer 2017) and one in Warsaw (fall 2017); thanks to those experiences she was able to organize by herself a workshop at university of Trento in order to build a platform of young holocaust researchers. She is also Yad Vashem fellow 2017, EHRI Fellow 2018 and IFZ Fellow 2019.

Daniela Ozacky-Stern

Daniela Ozacky-Stern is a Post-doctoral researcher in the Institute of Holocaust Research, Bar-Ilan University, Israel. She was an EHRI Fellow at USHMM. She earned her Ph.D. (Approved: August 2018) in Jewish History at The University of Haifa, Israel, studying the Jewish partisans in the forests of Lithuania and West Belarus during The Second World War and the Holocaust. In her research she examines the history of the Jewish partisans by using over 300 testimonies, as well as other archival material.

Katharina Von Schnurbein

Katharina von Schnurbein was appointed the first European Commission Coordinator on combatting Antisemitism in December 2015. Prior to this, she worked for five years as advisor to EU Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso on the dialogue with religions and non-confessional organisations.

Jolanta Ambrosewicz-Jacobs

Jolanta Ambrosewicz-Jacobs

Dr. hab. Jolanta Ambrosewicz-Jacobs teaches at the UNESCO Chair for Education about the Holocaust at the Institute for European Studies at the Jagiellonian University (JU) and between 2008 and 2016 was the Director of the Center for Holocaust Studies at the JU.

Denisa Nestakhova

Denisa Nešťáková is a historian. She studied History and Slovak language and literature at the Comenius University in Bratislava (Slovakia), and Jewish civilizations at the Hochschule für jüdische Studien in Heidelberg (Germany). In June 2018, she defended her dissertation thesis titled “Whoever is not with me is against me.” Arab-Jewish relations during British Mandate for Palestine through the perspective of the German Temple Society at the Comenius University in Bratislava.

Dieter Pohl

Dieter Pohl is Professor for Contemporary History at the Alpen-Adria-University Klagenfurt, Austria. He authored several books on the Holocaust and German occupation in Poland, Ukraine and Russia, and is co-editor of the 16 volume document series on the Persecution and Murder of European Jews, which is being published since 2007, and currently translated into English together with Yad Vashem in Israel. He also serves as member of the Executive Board of the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure.

Laurence Prempain

Laurence Prempain is a French independent researcher, specialised in Polish Jewish immigration in France during the interwar period and World War II. Through an analytical framework based on gender and microhistory, her research focuses on the avoidance and transgressions strategies Jewish people developed. Her affiliation to the CCFEF (Centre of French Civilisation and French Studies, Warsaw) and to the Centre of Nordic Studies (CENS, Helsinki) supports her work on Holocaust in a synergistic European approach.

David Silberklang

Dr. David Silberklang is Senior Historian at the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem, and Editor of the scholarly journal Yad Vashem Studies. He teaches Jewish History at the University of Haifa’s Weiss-Livnat International MA Program in Holocaust Studies and at the Rothberg International School of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has also taught at Royal Holloway University of London, the University of Sydney, and Case Western Reserve University, among others.

Wichert ten Have

Dr. Wichert ten Have is a historian. He is Advisor to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). Former director of Holocaust and Genocide Stucies at the Netherlands Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (Ret.). He has lectured at Amsterdam University, Department of History. His main topics include the history of the Netherlands other European countries and the German Occupation in World War II, the history of the Holocaust, Prevention and Memory of Mass Violence.

Florian Zabransky

Florian Zabransky

Florian Zabransky is a doctoral researcher at the University of Sussex. He was awarded the Clemens N. Nathan Scholarship for his research on male Jewish intimacy during the Holocaust. Florian studied Sociology at Goethe-University Frankfurt, Sapienza – Università di Roma and Hamburg University. He also worked at institutions commemorating the Holocaust, including the Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial Site near Hamburg and the Fritz Bauer Institute in Frankfurt am Main.

Wendy Lower

Wendy Lower

Wendy Lower is the John K. Roth Professor of History and Director of the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights at Claremont McKenna College. She chairs the Academic Committee of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Her research and teaching focus on the history of genocide, the Holocaust and human rights. Lower is the author of Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields (Houghton, 2013) which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and has been translated into 23 languages.

Diana Dumitru

Dr. Diana Dumitru received her Ph.D. in history and B.A. in history and psychology from the State Pedagogical University “Ion Creanga” of Moldova.

Diana Dumitru has received several awards for her exceptional scholarship including the Soros Foundation Doctoral Studies Award and a Junior Faculty Development Fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—a program sponsored by the United States Department of State. She graduated with First Place Honors from the State Pedagogical University “Ion Creanga” of Moldova for her doctoral studies.