David Assaf is Professor of modern Jewish History at Tel Aviv University and holds the Sir Isaac Wolfson Chair of Jewish Studies. His most recent book (with Yael Darr) is Hope We Meet Again: Jewish Pupils’ Letters from Poland to Eretz Israel Between the Two World Wars (Magnes Press, 2024).
Krzysztof Bielawski is a historian and researcher of Jewish cemeteries. From 2009 to 2024, he worked as a Jewish heritage specialist at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. Currently, Bielawski is a project coordinator at the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage. In 2005 he started the website Jewish Cemeteries in Poland (www.cmentarze-zydowskie.pl). He authored various articles on Jewish cemeteries and funeral customs and an award-winning book Zagłada cmentarzy żydowskich (Warsaw, 2020), English-language appeared as The Destruction of Jewish Cemeteries in Poland with Academic Studies Press in 2024.
Yael Darr is a full professor in the MA Program in Culture Research at Tel Aviv University. Her main field of research is Jewish children’s culture during the first half of the twentieth century. She is currently engaged in a comparative study of the impact of the vast Jewish immigration during the first half of the 20th century on Jewish children’s culture in Europe and Palestine. She has published articles and books on these topics, among them The Nation and the Child: Nation Building in Hebrew Children’s Literature, 1930-1970 (John Benjamins Publishing Company: Philadelphia, 2018) and Hope We Meet Again: Jewish Pupils’ Letters from Poland to Eretz Israel Between the Two World Wars, co-authored with Prof. David Assaf, (Magnes Press: Jerusalem, 2024 [Hebrew]).
Marta Duch-Dyngosz is a sociologist affiliated with the Jagiellonian University in Cracow. Her fields of interest include Jewish/non-Jewish relations, Jewish heritage, memory of the Holocaust, the far-right movement in Poland, social theory, and memory studies. Currently, she is working on a book project on commemorative practices relating to the Jewish past in the former shtetls in Poland.
Clare Fester is an Australian-born public historian and librarian living in Los Angeles. She began her career as program director at the arts and culture nonprofit Yiddishkayt and currently directs all programs at Topa Institute, where Yiddishkayt is now housed. Between 2014 and 2019, she ran Yiddishkayt’s Wallis Annenberg Helix Fellowship. This flagship program takes artists and scholars to formerly majority Jewish areas of central and eastern Europe to learn about histories and legacies of intercultural collaboration. While the fellowship is on hiatus, Clare continues to run arts and culture retreats at Topa Institute. She is also an information and communications technology support worker in the Los Angeles Public Library system.
Marta Frączkiewicz is a curator of the collections of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. She graduated from the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, majoring in ethnology and cultural anthropology, archeology and gender studies, and Polish-Jewish studies at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. In her work, she mainly deals with personal and historical memorabilia.
Ruth Ellen Gruber has written on Jewish heritage issues for more than three decades and currently runs the website www.jewish-heritage-europe.eu A former foreign correspondent based in six countries for United Press International, she has authored, edited, or contributed to numerous books, articles, journals, and other publications. Her books include “Jewish Heritage Travel: A Guide to Eastern Europe” as well as “Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe,” “Upon the Doorposts of Thy House: Jewish Life in East-Central Europe, Yesterday and Today,” and “Letters from Europe (and Elsewhere).” The recipient of Poland’s Knight’s Cross of the Order of Merit, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEH grant, and other awards and honors, she was the Distinguished Visiting Chair in Jewish Studies at the College of Charleston, SC, in 2015. (She also has a longterm project on the European fascination with the American Wild West, its mythology, and its music.)
Aleksandra Jakubczak is a historian specializing in the social and economic history of Eastern European Jewry in the modern period. In 2023, she received her Ph.D. in Jewish History at Columbia University in New York. Since 2022, she has worked as a Chief Historian at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. Currently, she is preparing a book manuscript titled Daughter, Migrant, (Sex)Worker: Prostitution in the World of Eastern European Jewry.
Aleksandra Janus holds a PhD in Anthropology from the Jagiellonian University in Cracow (Poland). She works at the intersections of academia, art, and activism. She is president of the Zapomniane Foundation and co-founder of the Engaged Memory Consortium, which aims to create and propose an innovative approach to remembrance. She is a collaborator of the Research Center for Memory Cultures (Jagiellonian University), a member of the global network and project "Thinking Through The Museum," and the editorial board of the Jagiellonian/Columbia University Press book series “Exhibiting Theory.” She co-curates the ‘Exercising Modernity’ program aimed at critically rethinking the legacy of modernity. In 2023, she co-initiated a network of contemporary Jewish artists in Poland, “Kultur-Lige”. In 2014, she co-founded the ‘Museum Lab’ (Laboratorium Muzeum) - an educational program in critical museology in Poland (2014-2017), and in 2020 a working group „Museums for the Climate” as well as the „Culture for Climate” collective, as part of which she co-authored a guidebook under the same title.
Joanna Kabrońska is an architect who works as an assistant professor at the Faculty of Architecture, Gdańsk University of Technology. Her scientific interests include Jewish cultural and architectural heritage as well as emerging technologies in architecture. She is the author of the monograph “Architecture as a Form of Memory: The Role of Architecture in Creating the Contemporary Horizon of Values” (in Polish, 2008) and numerous articles and book chapters, including “Memoryscapes of Eastern Poland” (2018) and “Synagogues of Historic Poland - Their Present and Future” (in Polish, 2021). Currently, she is working on a book about the material and spatial aspects of the memory of the pre-war Jewish community in Poland.
Przemysław Kaniecki is a literary historian, film studies scholar, anthropologist; lecturer in the Faculty of “Artes Liberales” at the University of Warsaw, and curator of collections at the POLIN Museum. He is the author of two books Wniebowstąpienia Konwickiego [Konwicki’s Ascensions] and Samospalenia Konwickiego [Konwicki’s Self-Immolations] (2013, 2014). In 2011, he published an extended interview with Tadeusz Konwicki entitled ‘W pośpiechu’ [In a Hurry]. In 2016, he co-edited the POLIN Museum catalogue Przynoszę rzecz, przynoszę historię. Wywiady z darczyńcami [I Bring a Thing, I Bring a Story. Interviews with donors], with Judyta Pawlak.
Kamil Kijek is an Assistant Professor at the Jewish Studies Department, University of Wrocław, Poland. His research interests include Central-East European Jewish History at the end of the 19th and 20th centuries and social and cultural theory. He has been a Prins Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Jewish History in New York and Sosland Family Fellow at the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, as well as Gerda Henkel Research Fellow at the Wiener Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies and Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Holocaust Studies in Munich. In 2018, he received an international prize for an outstanding publication on the topic of “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 for the book Dzieci modernizmu. [Children of Modernity].
Joanna Król-Komła has worked at the POLIN Museum since 2010, developing the Museum’s digital repository, oral history collection, resource center, and websites Virtual Shtetl and the Polish Righteous. She graduated from the University of Warsaw with a degree in Polish literature and Linguistics, and studied Jewish History at Tel Aviv University. Król-Komła is the author of numerous short documentaries and articles on Jewish history, including “During the war he was in the Łódź ghetto. A portrait of the architect Ignacy Gutman” [“Holocaust. Studies and Materials”, No. 16 (2020)].
Szymon Lenarczyk is an archaeologist, topographer, and owner of the Wykop na Poziomie company. He cooperates with scientific units of the Central Archaeological Center, the Faculty of Archaeology of the University of Warsaw, and the Museum of the History of Polish Culture. He specializes in broad-scale archaeological works carried out at Jewish cemeteries throughout Poland.
Emil Majuk has been a project manager, tourist guide and heritage interpretation expert at the “Grodzka Gate - NN Theatre” Centre in Lublin since 2005. He is the initiator and coordinator of the “Shtetl Routes” project aimed at popularising Jewish cultural heritage in the borderland between Poland, Ukraine and Belarus. He is also the curator of the permanent exhibition on the local multicultural past of the shtetl Wojsławice located in the former synagogue building.
Hune Margulies has served for many years as the housing policy officer of several Hasidic communities in New York. He earned a Ph.D from Columbia University in New York City for his doctoral dissertation, which studied the spatial communal culture of the Hasidic Community. He is the founder and director of “The Martin Buber Institute for Dialogical Ecology”, an independent scholarly institution that studies the points of confluence between the Dialogical Philosophy of Martin Buber and some aspects of Zen Buddhism and its Pure Land school. Margulies is the author of Martin Buber and Eastern Wisdom Teachings: The Recovery of the Spiritual Imagination (Cambridge Scholars Publishers, 2022), Will and Grace: Meditations on the Dialogical Philosophy of Martin Buber (Sense/ Brill Publishers, 2018) and The Social Structure of the Hasidic Polity: A New Utopia (Columbia University Press, 2000). Presently, Margulies lectures at Goa and Mumbai Universities in India.
Małgorzata Michalska-Nakonieczna is an art historian, lecturer, creator, and dean of Interior Design studies at the University College of Enterprise and Administration in Lublin. In 2021, she defended her doctoral thesis entitled “Elements of the Jewish Architectural Heritage in Urban Structures and Cultural Landscape of Small Towns of Lubelszczyzna” with distinction at the Faculty of Architecture of the Warsaw University of Technology. Michalska-Nakonieczna authored publications on the history of architecture and culture of the 19th and 20th centuries and the protection of cultural landscape and ethnography. Her scientific interests include the history of architecture and urban planning of the 19th and 20th centuries, the Jewish community in Poland, the ethnography of the Lublin region, and artistic craft.
Mikhail Mitsel is the Senior Research Archivist at the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee Archives in New York City. He graduated from Lviv State University with an MA in History. Before his position at JDC, Mitsel was a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Jewish Studies in Kyiv in the 1990s, where he led a project on “Jewish Religious Communities in Ukraine after WWII.” Mitsel is the author of many articles and books, including List of Insurgents of 1863 Imprisoned in the Kyiv Fortress (Przemyśl, 2023); In Search of Scapegoat: Phobias of Late Stalinism in Ukraine (1944-1953) (Kyiv, 2023); Politics and Paranoia: The Fight of the Communist Party of Ukraine Against “World Zionism” (Kyiv, 2021); “The Final Chapter”: Agro-Joint in the Years of the Great Terror (Kyiv, 2012); Jews of Ukraine in 1943-1953: A Documented Study (Kyiv, 2004); Jewish Religious Communities in Ukraine: Kyiv, Lviv: 1945-1981 (Kyiv, 1998).
Karolina Panz is a sociologist and a member of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research. Her research interests are Jewish life and the Holocaust in the Polish province, with a particular focus on the microhistory of Jews and the history of Polish–Jewish relations in the Podhale region, where she lives and volunteers in the People not Numbers Project. Her dissertation, which concerned the fate of Nowy Targ Jews before and during the Holocaust, was awarded first prize in the Majer Balaban Competition, as well as first prize in the Inka Brodzka-Wald Competition. Her most recent publications are: “Nowy Targ County” in Jan Grabowski and Barbara Engelking, eds., Night without End. The Fate of Jews in German-occupied Poland (Indiana University Press, 2022); “The Poles Are Taking Over All of Rabka: A Microhistory of Ethnic Cleansing” in Anna Wylegała, Sabina Rutar and Małgorzata Łukianow, eds., No Neighbors’ Lands in Postwar Europe. Vanishing Others (2023) and “Rescue and Smuggling Networks in the Polish-Slovak Borderland during the Holocaust”; in Eliyana R. Adler, Natalia Aleksiun eds. Entanglements of War: Social Networks during the Holocaust (2022). Currently, she is a Post-Doc Fellow of the Claims Conference Saul Kagan Fellowship in Advanced Shoah Studies.
Antony Polonsky is Professor Emeritus at Brandeis University and Chief Historian of Global Education Outreach Project of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Warsaw. His most recent work is The Jews in Poland and Russia volume 1, 1350 to 1881; volume 2 1881 to 1914; volume 3, 1914 to 2008 (Oxford, 2010, 2012), published in 2013 in an abridged version The Jews in Poland and Russia. A Short History (2014), which has been translated into French, Polish and Lithuanian. He holds honorary doctorates from the University of Warsaw (2010), the Jagiellonian University (2014) and the Polish University Abroad (2022).
Tomasz Rakowski is an ethnologist, cultural anthropologist, associate professor at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Warsaw, and lecturer at the Institute of Polish Culture. His research interests include social art, phenomenological anthropology, postsocialist transformation and postsocialist, bottom-up developments. He conducts field studies in Poland and Mongolia.
Natalia Romik is a political science graduate and a practitioner of architecture, designer, and artist. In 2018, she received her PhD at the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London for a thesis Post-Jewish Architecture of Memory within Former Eastern European Shtetls. She combines academic research with methods of contemporary art and architecture to explore the (post)Jewish architecture of memory. Romik has been awarded numerous grants, including the London Arts and Humanities Partnership, Gerda Henkel Stiftung, and GEOP. From 2007 to 2014, she cooperated with the Nizio Design studio and was a consultant for, among others, the POLIN Museum core exhibition design and co-author of the revitalization of a synagogue in Chmielnik. Romik is a member of the SENNA architecture collective, responsible for designs, including the exhibition at the Museum of Jews in Upper Silesia in Gliwice and a permanent exhibition at the Brodno Jewish Cemetery in Warsaw entitled “Beit Almin – Eternal Home”. In 2018, she co-curated the exhibition Estranged: March ’68 and Its Aftermath and “(post)JEWISH…Shtetl Opatów Through the Eyes of Mayer Kirshenblatt” (POLIN).
Dariusz Stola is a historian and a Professor at the Institute for Political Science, Polish Academy of Sciences. He works on the history of Communist Poland, international migrations, and Polish-Jewish relations. He is the author of multiple articles and books, among others, “Anti-Zionist Campaign in Poland” 1867-1968 (in Polish, 2000), and “Country with no exit? Migrations from Poland 1949-1989” (in Polish, 2010) that won Polityka award in the category of history. In 2014-2019, he was the director of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews.
Aleksandra Szczepan is a postdoctoral researcher in the project “Adjustment and Radicalization: Dynamics in Popular Culture(s) in Pre-War Eastern Europe” at the University of Potsdam, funded by the Leibniz Gemeinschaft. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the Jagiellonian University in Kraków where she is a co-founder of the Research Center for Memory Cultures. She has also worked as a researcher and interviewer in oral history projects undertaken by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Poland, Spain, and Kazakhstan. She is currently preparing a book project focused on the role of maps in Holocaust testimony.
Monika Tarajko is a PhD student at the Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin and works as a program specialist at the Grodzka Gate–NN Theater Center. She coordinates many projects devoted to Jewish history and tradition. She is a member of the Well of Memory Association and the co-author of “The Handbook of Good Practices in the Protection of Jewish Cemeteries.” For several years, she has been involved in inventorying and cleaning Jewish cemeteries in the Lublin region.
Barbara Törnquist-Plewa is a professor of Eastern and Central European Studies at Lund University in Sweden. Her main research interests are nationalism, identity, and memory politics in Eastern and Central Europe. In the years 2012-2016, she was the leader of the extensive European research network “In Search for Transcultural Memory in Europe” (financed by the EU’s COST-program) and, in the years 2017-2020, she was co-leader of the Nordic research network of Historical Trauma Studies. She is the editor of the book series “Memory, Heritage and Public History” at CEU Press and a member of the editorial boards of several international scientific journals. She published extensively on the issues of difficult memory. Her publications include: “Tale of Szydlowiec. Memory and Oblivion in a Former Shtetl in Poland” in the anthology „The Holocaust on post-war Battlefields: Genocide as Historical Culture.” Malmö-Lund (2006); “The transnational dynamics of local remembrance: The Jewish past in a former Shtetl in Poland” Memory Studies (2018) and “In Search of Transnational and Transcultural Memories of the Holocaust: Examples from Sweden and Poland”, S.I.M.O.N. Shoah: Intervention. Methods. Documentation. Wiesenthal Center 2021.
Magdalena Waligórska is a cultural historian and sociologist. Her fields of interest include: contemporary Polish and Belarusian history, nationalism and national symbols, Jewish heritage and popular culture, Jewish/non-Jewish relations, music and identity, and memory studies. She is currently based at the European Ethnology Department of the Humboldt University in Berlin, leading an ERC research group studying genocidal dispossession in Eastern Europe. She has published extensively on Jewish culture, Jewish-non-Jewish relations, and nationalism, among others, in: East European Politics and Societies, Holocaust Studies, East European Jewish Affairs and Jewish Cultural Studies. She is the author of Klezmer’s Afterlife: An Ethnography of the Jewish Music Revival in Poland and Germany (Oxford University Press, 2013) and Cross Purposes: Catholicism and the Political Imagination in Poland (Cambridge University Press, 2023).
Yechiel Weizman is an assistant professor at the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at Bar-Ilan University. He completed his PhD at the University of Haifa and was a research fellow at the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow in Leipzig. His research focuses on the encounter between Jews and non-Jews during and after WWII in Eastern Europe, the aftermath and memory of the Holocaust in Poland, the wartime and postwar fate of the Jewish property, and Holocaust photography. His articles appeared in several journals and edited volumes, and his first book, Unsettled Heritage: Living Next to Poland’s Material Jewish Traces after the Holocaust, was published by Cornell University Press in 2022.
Anna Wylegała is a sociologist and Associate Professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences. Her work focuses on the social history of the II World War in Poland and Ukraine. She is also interested in qualitative social research methodology, oral history, and memory studies. She is the author of two monographs: Displaced Memories: Remembering and Forgetting in Post-War Poland and Ukraine (2019) and Był dwór, nie ma dworu. Reforma rolna w Polsce [There was an estate, there is no more estate. Agricultural reform in Poland] (2021). She also co-edited two other volumes: The Burden of the Past: History, Memory and Identity in Contemporary Ukraine (2020) and No Neighbors’ Lands: Vanishing Others in Postwar Europe (2023). Currently, she is a coordinator of the Polish part of the project “24.02.2022, 5 am: Testimonies from the War”, focused on documenting the Ukrainian experience of the current war.
