People in EHRI

For every issue of the EHRI Newsletter we ask someone who works for EHRI to tell a little about themselves and what they do for EHRI. On this page we present these articles together. This is only a small selection of all the people that work(ed) for EHRI (first and second phase), and who are based at EHRI's 23 partner institutions.

People in EHRI: Adina Babesh – Works for the EHRI Team at CegeSoma

Adina Babesh works at the Belgian State Archives - Centre for Historical Research and Documentation on War and Society. She is involved in EHRI Work Package 9 on Data Identification and Integration and Work Package 11 on Users and Standards.

A usual day starts for me early around 6-6:30am. I am by no means a morning person, but I prefer having a nice seat on the two trams, which take me to work, and I can enjoy reading a few pages from a good book. ‘Autour de ton cou’ (Adichie) is a favorite these days in an effort to improve my French!

People in EHRI: Leah Sidebotham - Digital Asset Manager

Leah Sidebotham is part of the Engagement Team at The Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide in London. She has been in charge of EHRI's Facebook and Twitter pages in Work Package 2 on Communication and will later this year start as Digital Asset Manager as part of the more technical Work Packages 10 and 13.

People in EHRI: Elske Rotteveel - EHRI Project Manager

Elske Rotteveel works as EHRI project manager at the NIOD Institute for Holocaust, War and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam. She has been working for EHRI since the early summer of 2017. She is mainly active in WP1 Management, but is also in touch with the other work packages.

Anna Ullrich

Anna Ullrich - Research Assistant at the Center for Holocaust Studies at IfZ Munich and Involved in EHRI's Training and Education

By the time I reached High School my interest in the history of National Socialism and particularly the history of the Holocaust had already been sparked, thanks to engaged teachers, study trips to memorial sites and meeting survivors. There was no doubt that this would also become a focal point of my study once I became a student in history, political and media science at the University of Trier in 2006. My master thesis focused on the Zionist newspaper "Jüdische Rundschau" and its news coverage during the first years of National Socialism.

Charlotte Hauwaert

Charlotte Hauwaert from the Belgian State Archives I CegeSoma: Coordination of EHRI’s Data Integration

I joined the EHRI project in September 2016, just after finishing my Advanced Master’s program. I am based at the Belgian State Archives I CegeSoma (Centre for Historical Research and Documentation on War and Society) in Brussels.

Neringa Latvyte-Gustaitiene

Neringa Latvyte-Gustaitiene from the Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum: Involved in EHRI Communication and Training

A member of EHRI Work packages on Communication and Dissemination (WP2) and Training and Education (WP4), Neringa Latvyte-Gustaitiene is chief of the History Research Department and acting head of the Memorial Museum of Paneriai at the Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum, Lithuania, as well as a PhD candidate at the Communication Faculty of the Vilnius University.

In 1999, I started working as an historian at the Holocaust exhibition in the Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum. In 2002, I published my first book about the Holocaust in the Trakai region. In 2010, I was appointed as a chief of the History Research Department and was a curator of the renovation of the Holocaust exhibition and the editor of the exhibition’s catalogue.

People in EHRI – Daniel Cesarani

Daniel Cesarani works in the Visitor Services Team and Collections Department of The Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide in London’s Russell Square.

I have been working with EHRI since soon after I joined the Wiener Library around a year and a half ago. With a strong family connection to Holocaust studies I wanted to work in a field that could support academics working in the field and increase my experience in the subject at the same time. The Wiener Library gave me both opportunities and EHRI has proven to be a very welcome addition to my responsibilities here. At The Wiener Library I am in charge of the Periodicals Collection as well as responding to question from our readers via the Wiener Library Contact page.

Ján Hlavinka

Ján Hlavinka works for the Holocaust Documentation Center in Bratislava

A member of EHRI Working Groups on Dissemination (WP2) and New Methodologies, Data Identification and Integration (WP9), Ján Hlavinka is a researcher at the Holocaust Documentation Center as well as at the Institute of History of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava, Slovakia.

In 2002 I started my carrier as a researcher at the Museum of Slovak National Uprising in Banská Bystrica and couple of months later I moved to the Nations Memory Institute in Bratislava (2003-2008). There I co-developed and later led the project focusing on the documentation of the Holocaust. The project included the gathering of sources for later published databases as well as the academic research. In 2007 I published my first monograph focused on the victims of Holocaust from the district of Medzilaborce.

Anastasia Loudarou

Anastasia Loudarou, works for EHRI and the Jewish Museum of Greece

Member of EHRI Working Groups 6. Coordination with Humanities Research Infrastructures and 9. New Methodologies, Data Identification and Integration. She is a researcher at the Jewish Museum of Greece.

In 2007 I started working as a researcher at the Jewish Museum of Greece and in 2010 I was appointed head of the museum's digital project "Judaica Europeana", a programme funded by the EU and in the framework of the European Union’s digitization programme eContentplus. The aim of the project was to bring together and connect museums, libraries, archives and institutions that hold important and/or original material related to Jewish history, culture and life in Europe.

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Laura Brazzo, works for the Foundation Jewish Contemporary Documentation Center (CDEC), Italy

Involved in EHRI since May 2015

I received my degree in Contemporary history at the Università Statale of Milan. My thesis concerned the Italian Zionists and the Italian diplomats dealing with the question of the future of Palestine during the First World War.

My PhD thesis was in Political science and concerned with the relations between the EEC and the State of Israel and the construction of the "image” of Israel by the European Institutions from 1957 to 1973.

For almost ten years I was involved in the activities of the Chair of Contemporary History at the Università Statale in Milan and, at the same time, with the Commission of History of International Relations.

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László Csősz, works for EHRI WP2, 6, 8

Member of EHRI Work Packages WP2 Trans-institutional Research Guides, WP 6 Development of Interdisciplinary Methodologies, and WP8 Publicity and Dissemination

Through the dual perspectives of Holocaust scholar and archivist, I consider the launch of EHRI a landmark event for Holocaust and genocide scholarship in Eastern Europe. Therefore it has been an honour to take a share in this massive undertaking. Back in 2009, when Project Director Conny Kristel approached us to join the EHRI consortium, I was serving as Head of Collections at the Holocaust Memorial Center (HMC). In the summer of 2014, I left HMC to take the position of Senior Archivist at the Hungarian National Archives, which became a cooperating partner and currently virtually hosts the small research team on Hungary.

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Matthew Nicholson, EHRI Publicity and Dissemination

Matthew works in Visitor Services for The Wiener Library for the Study of Holocaust and Genocide in Russell Square, London. He has been part of EHRI for nearly a year and a half and works on the EHRI Newsletter.

I have been working at the Wiener Library since June 2013 as the Library's Visitor Services and have worked with Petra Drenth and Reto Speck on the EHRI newsletter for around the same period.

Diagram, Linda Reijnhoudt

Linda Reijnhoudt, Member of EHRI Work Package 17 (Standards and Guidelines) and 19 (Data Integration Infrastructure)

Developer at DANS (Data Archiving and Networked Services), the Netherlands

My first involvement with EHRI was on standards and guidelines, and how to translate those into a datamodel. The first step of getting used to the terminology took a while, because although I work at a digital archive (DANS), I had never set foot in an actual archive or spent time with a card catalogue.

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Anne Langer, co-organises EHRI's Final Launch Event

Assistant at the Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin

I started as a student research assistant at Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (Stiftung Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas) where I was involved with developing and organising several exhibitions.

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Kepa Joseba Rodriguez, EHRI's Online Portal and Research Environment

Kepa works for the Research and Development Department of the Göttingen State and University Library, Germany. In the lab, he is active for EHRI and works on the creation of the online portal and research environment.

I graduated with a Doctorate at the Centre for Mind and Brain Sciences (CiMEC) at the University of Trento (Italy) with a focus in Computational Linguistics and Corpus Linguistics.

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Laura Fontana, EHRI Online Training and Summer School Paris

Head Italian Department, Mémorial de la Shoah

In March 2013 I joined the EHRI family, as I was appointed by the Mémorial de la Shoah coordinator for this project, that is probably one of the most challenging projects I have ever been involved into.

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Ewa Mork, Member of EHRI Work Package 18, Keywords and Thesaurus

Head of Documentation at the Center for the Study of the Holocaust and Religious Minorities in Oslo (HL-senteret), Norway

HL-senteret is probably the youngest institution among the EHRI affiliates. The creation of the center was a result of a year-long process involving the restitution of property and assets confiscated from the Norwegian Jews during the Second World War.

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Wolfgang Schellenbacher, EHRI Work Package Member on Trans-institutional Research Guides

When Michal Frankl, Head of the Shoah History department at the Jewish Museum in Prague, asked me to be a part of EHRI, I was really excited to be involved in such a large and ambitious project, working together with Holocaust institutions throughout Europe and Israel.

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Petra Drenth, Publicity and Dissemination Officer EHRI

Like everyone working for EHRI, I am in fact employed by one of the 20 organisations that form the consortium. My office is at NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in the Netherlands. NIOD is coordinator for EHRI and the Dutch institute has been involved in the project from the start.

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Veerle Vanden Daelen, Leader of Work Package 15, Identification and Investigation

When the director of Ceges-Soma, Rudi Van Doorslaer, contacted me about EHRI last year, I was very enthusiastic to become part of the project. The work package I am coordinating identifies Holocaust-related sources. It delivers the content (the material) with which other work packages construct the EHRI infrastructure in order to make it accessible to the wider research community.

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Reto Speck, Leader of Work Package 20, Portal and VRE

I was very excited when an opportunity arose to join the EHRI team at King's College London earlier this year, as the project allows me to strike a perfect balance between my diverse interests. By training I am a historian. My doctoral thesis was concerned with the history of historiography during the European Enlightenment, and I have taught the history of political thought at Queen Mary, University of London. But I also have a strong interest in the digital humanities and in digital research infrastructures, and had worked in these fields for several years before I started my PhD.

Andrea Löw, Work Package Leader of WP 5, Training

The EHRI project had only just started when I moved from Berlin to Munich, so the launch in Brussels was my first official trip after I began working at the Institute of Contemporary History (IfZ). During the first few months I was involved in the project as a kind of advisor, without having any special responsibilities, but during the EHRI meeting in Prague last May my colleague Johannes Hürter, leader of Work Package 4, asked me whether I would like to become leader of Work Package 5, to which I enthusiastically agreed.