Ayelet Eva Herbst is a PhD candidate at Ludwig Maximilian University in the Institute of Eastern and Southeastern European History. She studied Holocaust, Communication, and Tolerance at Touro University Berlin and graduated in 2018. She wrote her Master’s thesis on Jewish refugee movements to Eastern Ukraine during the Second World War. She is a former fellow of the Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich Studienwerk, and a recipient of the Conny Kristel Fellowship and a residency of the Institute for Urban History of East Central Europe in Lviv. Her research interests focus on the Holocaust in Ukraine and Jewish migration during the Second World War and the Holocaust, with a particular emphasis on the everyday life experiences of individuals and families. Specializing in ego-documents, Herbst employs a bottom-up approach to studying the experiences of Jews via a contextual analysis of their wartime diaries, testimonies, interviews, and memoirs. In the past 5 years she has provided such expertise to different memorial projects across Berlin.
In her doctoral dissertation, Herbst follows the trails of Jews who escaped Lwów (today Lviv, Ukraine) between 1941 and 1944 and tried to survive the Holocaust in German-occupied territories. Positioned at the intersection of migration and Holocaust studies, her study asks how the flight of Polish Jews continued following the German invasion of the Soviet Union and the occupation of eastern Galicia and examines the emergence of flight as a survival strategy. Herbst aims to contribute to the fields of Holocaust studies by challenging the conventional link between flight, border crossing, and survival.