Cohort VII – Academic year 2014-2015

Aliza Luft, PhD Candidate, Dept. of Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison Aliza Luft’s research focuses on the decision-making processes underlying individuals’ behaviors in high-risk contexts, particularly in genocides as they decide whether to support or resist violent state regimes. Luft’s dissertation, Defecting from the Episcopate, examines the process by which French bishops during the Holocaust in France deviated from their…

Cohort VI – Academic year 2013-2014

Cohort VI is our first cohort with both Ph.D. and Postdoctoral candidates. Istvan Pal Adam, Ph.D. candidate in History, University of Bristol, UK A native Hungarian, Mr. Adam’s research incorporates files of a post-war denazifying process, testimonies, autobiographical sources and contemporary journals to show how an otherwise insignificant group of ordinary Hungarians became intermediaries between…

Sylwia Szymanska-Smolkin

Claims Conference Fellows come from, and are studying in, numerous countries. Sylwia Szymanska-Smolkin, originally from Poland, is one of the scholars whose research is partially funded by the Claims Conference. Sylwia is studying the Polish Police and their dealings with the Jewish population during WWII, but growing up in Jozefow, Poland, she was not really…

Ella Florsheim

Ella Florsheim PhD studied the revival of Yiddish culture in the Displaced Persons camps in Germany after World War II and especially the broad-ranging Yiddish press published in the camps. She is interested in the different expressions of this revival, such as literary and journalistic writing and theatrical activity, and in particular its connection to the…

Cohort III – Academic year 2010-2011

Irena Cantorovich‘s dissertation on “Jews in the Mixed Detachments of the Partisan Movement in Lithuania, Belorussia and Ukraine (1941-1944)” is intended to shed new light on the Jewish life in Lithuania, Belorussia and Ukraine during the Holocaust. In her work, Ms. Cantorovich hopes to increase the understanding of the complicated relationship between Jews and gentiles…

Cohort I – Academic year 2008-2009

Cohort V – Academic year 2012-2013

Meet the Fellows… Susanne Barth, Ph.D. candidate, Carl-von-Ossietzky-University of Oldenburg, Germany Ms. Barth is working on a dissertation project called “The Oberschlesische Hydrierwerke AG and the Auschwitz Subcamp of Blechhammer, 1939-1945.” Blechhammer was a large complex of labour camps belonging to the synfuel plant Oberschlesische Hydrierwerke AG, established in 1939-1940 in Upper Silesia. Nearly 50,000…

Kierra Crago-Schneider

Cohort II Kierra Crago-Schneider PhD studied the day-to-day interactions among Jewish survivors (mainly those living in Displaced Persons centers), Germans, and American soldiers in postwar Munich, specifically through their involvement with the postwar German economy. Dr. Crago-Schneider has been interested in Shoah studies since she was a little girl and learned that her grandmother’s family fled from…