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Winter-Spring 2025 Mimi Pasternak Toubin (z”l) Public Educational Programming

Please check out our upcoming virtual programs!

The following programs, are made possible thanks to the generous support of the Miriam “Mimi” Pasternak Toubin (z”l) Public Educational Programming from the JDC Archives.

2025 International Holocaust Remembrance Day Webinar:

Homecoming: Holocaust Survivors and Greece, 1941–1946
Monday, January 27, 2025
12:00pm-1:15pm (Eastern)

In this lecture, Dr. Kateřina Králová will present her upcoming book, Homecoming: Holocaust Survivors and Greece, 1941–46, which examines the experiences of Greek Jews who returned after surviving persecution, combat, and exile during World War II. During the war, the Jews of Greece went into hiding, survived as far-flung refugees, fought as partisans, or were deported to Nazi death camps from which few returned. Though they wanted more than anything to survive and come home, those who returned faced isolation, anguish, deprivation, and hostility in the midst of the Greek Civil War. Their stories, which rarely feature in histories of the Holocaust, raise important questions about the aftermath of the war across Europe. Based on exhaustive archival research, and new testimonies and interviews with Holocaust survivors across several continents, this book brings new understanding of the genocide.

This webinar is cosponsored by the JDC Archives and the Jewish Museum of Greece. It is supported by Miriam “Mimi” Pasternak Toubin (z”l) Public Educational Programming from the JDC Archives.

Kateřina Králová is Professor of Contemporary History and Head of the Research Centre for Memory Studies, Institute of International Studies, Charles University (CUNI) in Prague, Czechia. Her work focuses on coming to terms with the Nazi past, the Holocaust, the Greek Civil War, conflict-related migration and post-war reconstruction. Králová, a graduate of Phillips University Marburg, has been awarded major international fellowships, including the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship, the Wiesenthal Institute Vienna Fellowship, the USHMM Fellowship, and the Fulbright Fellowship at Yale University. She is the author of Das Vermächtnis der Besatzung (Böhlau, 2016; BpB 2017), a book on Greek-German relations since the 1940s, and numerous articles and edited collections in Czech, English, German, and Greek. She serves as co-chair of the Welfare Working Group for the COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) Action Slow Memory. Homecoming: Holocaust Survivors and Greece, 1941-1946 will be published in April 2025 by Brandeis University Press.

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WEBINAR:

Between Entrepreneurship and Reliance on Welfare: Jewish Women Facing the Great War on the Eastern Home Front
Monday, February 10, 2025
12:00pm-1:15pm (Eastern)

While the Second World War and the Holocaust overshadow the previous traumatic experiences of Eastern European Jewry, World War I also constituted a life-changing experience for millions of Eastern European Jews. The conflict created a vast number of Jewish refugees, ruined Jewish businesses, and brought mass Jewish emigration to a halt. The unprecedented precarious situation of Eastern European Jewish communities drew the attention of American Jewry which, for the first time, got involved directly in the region to support their fellow Jews in dire need.

Drawing on material from the JDC Archives, memoirs, autobiographies, local press, and Jewish communal reports, this talk will explore how Jewish women experienced these challenging years of displacement, violence, and economic ruin. It will discuss the limited options, from peddling and sex work to applying for charity, that were available to Jewish women on the Eastern home front.

This is the fifth program in the JDC Archives webinar series Exploring the Jewish Experience in Poland from WWI to the Holocaust: Insights from the JDC Archives.

Aleksandra Jakubczak is a historian specializing in the social and economic history of Eastern European Jewry in the modern period. Since 2022, she has been working as a chief historian at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. She received her Ph.D. in Jewish History at Columbia University in New York in 2023. Her doctoral dissertation, titled “Sex)Worker, Migrant, Daughter: The Jewish Economics of Sex Work and Mobility, 1870–1939,” explored how Eastern European Jewish women experienced urbanization, industrialization, and mass migration by examining their involvement in selling and organizing sex. She is currently the Rothschild HaNadiv fellow at the Center for Research on Antisemitism at the Technical University of Berlin, where she is pursuing a new research project about the transformation of Jewish family life in Poland between 1914 and 1945. She is the recipient of the Sorrell and Lorraine Chesin/JDC Archives Fellowship for 2024.

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WEBINAR:

Finding Jewish Refugees in Africa: Reflections from the JDC Archives
Wednesday, March 12, 2025
12:00pm-1:15pm (Eastern)

During the Nazi period, at least ten thousand European Jews found refuge in southern, central, and eastern Africa. Their history has hardly been written. In part this is because their traces are so widely dispersed, reflecting the many organisations and officialdoms whose radar they crossed and the continents across which they moved. This talk will introduce some of these forgotten refugees and reflect on how—and why—we trace their stories.

Shirli Gilbert is Professor of Modern Jewish History at University College London. She obtained her D. Phil in Modern History from the University of Oxford and was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows at the University of Michigan. She has published widely on modern Jewish life, particularly the Holocaust and its legacies, and Jews in South Africa. She is currently writing a book about Jewish refugees from Nazism in British colonial Africa. She is the recipient of the Fred and Ellen Lewis/JDC Archives Fellowship for 2024.

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WEBINAR:

Global Perspectives on JDC’s Assistance to Jewish DPs with Health-Related Challenges, 1945-1963
Monday, April 28, 2025
12:00pm-1:15pm (Eastern)

The ability to work, hence to become a productive member of the receiving country was a defining principle of the global migration regime in the post-1945 era. Thus, being unable to work due to health reasons imposed a major burden in the process of resettlement and resulted in part of the sh’erit ha-pletah (“surviving remnant”) living in care facilities and camps from 1945 through the 1950s, and in some cases until 1963. The JDC was directly involved in organizing health care and rehabilitation efforts in order to foster resettlement and negotiate migration schemes. This talk draws on case studies from Austria, Israel, and Shanghai to examine the challenges Holocaust survivors with chronic illnesses, disabilities, and handicaps encountered in Europe and Asia after 1945 and how the JDC provided assistance along their migration routes.

Johannes Glack is a contemporary historian and doctoral researcher at the Department of Contemporary History of the University of Vienna, where he is engaged in the ERC project “GLORE—Global Resettlement Regimes: Ambivalent Lessons Learned from the Postwar (1945-1951)”.” His research focuses on the migration processes of Jewish Displaced Persons (DPs) with health-related challenges from 1945 to 1963. Prior to joining the Institute of Contemporary History, he worked as a research assistant for the Yad Vashem archive and contributed to various national and international projects in the field of Shoah remembrance and commemoration work. He is the recipient of the Max and Cecil (Steuer) Chesin/JDC Archives Fellowship for 2024.

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