DAY ONE : Caen Memorial
9:30am Shuttle to the Caen Memorial
9:45am Welcome and coffee
10:00am Presentation of the University of Caen Normandy and the MRSH, by Dr. Pascal BULÉON, research director at the CNRS, director of the Excellence Center CAeSAR Numerique SHS, and Prof. Dr. Boris Czerny, professor at the University of Caen Normandy.
11am Opening ceremony of the permanent exhibition dedicated to the Holocaust, by Kléber ARHOUL, director of the Caen Memorial, and
Tal BRUTTMANN, historian.
1pm Lunch
2:30pm FIRST PANEL
2:30pm Prof. Dr. Boris CZERNY, ERLIS/University of Caen Normandy “Epigraphic issues in the analysis of registration documents for
the Jewish population of Brest (Belarus) (1941-1942) . Analysis based on the case of children”
3:10pm Katharina FREISE and Prof. Dr. Éva KOVÁCS, EHRI
“The European Holocaust Research Infrastructure: what do we do and how can you benefit?“
3:50pm Coffee break
4:00pm SECOND PANEL
4:00pm Prof. Dr. Andrea LÖW, IfZ
«German and Austrian Jews after their Deportation to ‘the East’ / Research at the Center for Holocaust Studies in Munich.”
4:40pm Dr. Sarah GRUSZKA, EHESS/CNRS/Sorbonne University and Dr. Marie MOUTIER-BITAN, ERLIS/University of Caen Normandy
“The Chair of Excellence ‘Holocaust and Genocide Studies’ at the
University of Caen Normandy : research projects and partnerships” and “Holocaust Diaries Project”
5:20pm Coffee break and free time at the Caen Memorial
7pm Lecture of Dr. Karel BERKHOFF
“Embedded with the Nazis. Foreign Journalists on Tour in the Holocaust in Ukraine, October 1941”
8:30pm Shuttle to the hotel Le Dauphin
Dinner at the hotel Le Dauphin
APRIL 2ND, 2025
DAY TWO : University of Caen
8:30am Shuttle to the University of Caen Normandy (Amphithéâtre de la MRSH) 8:45am Welcome and coffee
9:00am THIRD PANEL
9:00am Dr. Gaël EISMANN, HisTéMé/University of Caen Normandy and Françoise PASSERA, HisTéMé/University of Caen Normandy
“HisTeMé and Research on Racial Persecutions and the History of the Shoah: Results and Perspectives”
9:40am Nicolas MORZELLE, HisTéMé/University of Caen Normandy “Launching the deportation of Jews from France: between reprisals and persecution – the transport of March 27, 1942, and the transports of June 1942”
10:20am Dr. Anna ULLRICH, USHMM
“An Introduction to (International) Academic Programs at the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at USHMM.”
11:00am Coffee break
11:10am FOURTH PANEL
11:10am Dr. Robert ROSETT, Yad Vashem
“Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem and Beyond: Trends and
Challenges”
11:50am Dr. Pauline ANICET, ERLIS/University of Caen Normandy
“ New Historiographical Perspectives on the Holocaust in Belarus: Actors, Territories, Practices”
12:30am Lunch at the MRSH
1:30pm Departure to the Caen Memorial
2pm Omaha Beach, American Cemetery, German Cemetery 5:30pm Back to the Caen Memorial and shuttle to the hotel.
PRESENTATIONS OF THE PARTICIPANTS
Pauline ANICET
Since November 2024, Dr. Pauline ANICET has been a PhD in contemporary history. In January 2025, she joined the team working on the Brest-Litovsk ghetto project as a post-doctoral researcher (University of Caen, MRSH, ERLIS). Her research focuses on practices of violence and methods of killing during the Holocaust in Belarus.
Karel BERKHOFF
Dr. Karel BERKHOFF is a historian of Ukraine, the Holocaust, and World War II. He is Senior Researcher at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences). His publications include Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule (2004), Motherland in Danger: Soviet Propaganda during World War II (2012), and articles on the Babyn Yar massacre in Kyiv. He is also member of the editorial board of Yad Vashem Studies. He was (co-)director of the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure for six years.
Tal BRUTTMANN
Tal BRUTTMANN is a specialist in the history of the Holocaust. His research focuses on antisemitic policies in France during the war, as well as on the «Final Solution» in Europe. He has notably published La Logique des bourreaux (Hachette Littératures, 2003) and Au Bureau des affaires juives (La Décou verte, 2005), Auschwitz (La Découverte, 2015), and Les cent mots de la Shoah with Christophe TARRICONE (PUF, 2016). He has also edited several works, and his latest book, Un Album d’Auschwitz. Comment les nazis ont photographié leurs crimes (Le Seuil, 2023), written with Stefan HÖRDLER and Christoph KREUTZMÜLLER, analyzes photographs taken by the SS at Auschwitz and exa mines the use of images in historical research.
Pierre-Yves BUARD
cal rese
Boris Czerny
Prof. Dr. Boris CZERNY is Professor of Russian civilisation and literature at the University of Caen Normandy. Member of the Institut Universitaire de France, specialist in Jewish civilisation in Eastern Europe, Boris CZERNY has been leading the ‘Brest-Litovsk Ghetto’ project since 2021. The aim of this project is the human and spatial reconstruction of the Brest-Litovsk ghetto in Belarus. A first book on the subject was published in February 2025 under the title The Shoah in Belarus, Historical framework and methodological innovations, edited by Boris CZERNY and Claire LE FOLL, Honoré Champion.
Gaël EISMANN
Dr. Gaël EISMANN is a habilitated associate professor in contemporary history at the University of Caen Normandy, a researcher at the History, Territories, and Memories laboratory (HisTeMé, EA 7455), and an associate researcher at the German Historical Institute in Paris. Her research focuses on the Second World War, German occupation policies in Western Europe, and law enforce ment and repression in occupied France.
Katharina FREISE
Katharina FREISE joined the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) in 2020 to further develop its scope and help establish it as a permanent infrastructure. She has worked on developing EHRI’s wider impact beyond supporting excellence in Holocaust research and documentation as well as on broader user engagement. Within this context, she has been involved in developing the EHRI Podcast and in exploring ways in which EHRI can support excellence in Holocaust education.
Before joining EHRI in the Netherlands, Katharina developed her research support and management expertise at the University of Birmingham (UK), working with researchers in social sciences and the humanities on nurturing sustainable, innovative and inclusive research environments and on developing and delivering strategies for non-academic impact. Katharina has a master’s
degree in translation science that she gained with a thesis on the role of language in children’s books in shaping gender identities.
Sarah GRUSZKA
Dr. Sarah GRUSZKA is a historian and currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah, specializing in French Holocaust diaries. In 2023, she co-founded the “Holocaust Diaries Project” with Marie MOUTIER-BITAN. For over a decade, her research has focused on subjectivities shaped by extreme violence (war, hunger, the Holocaust), with a particular emphasis on diary practices. Her dissertation on the diaries of the Leningrad Blockade (1941–1944), completed at Sorbonne University, was awarded the So lemn Thesis Award in Humanities by the Chancery of the Universities of Paris in 2020. Dr. GRUSZKA is also a research associate at EHESS/CNRS/Sorbonne University.
Éva KOVÁCS
Prof. Dr., sociologist. KOVÁCS studied sociology and economics at the Corvinus University in Budapest, PhD 1994, Habilitation 2009. Deputy Director (Academic Affairs) of the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies and Research Professor at the Centre for Social Sciences/Hungarian Academy of Sciences
Centre of Excellence in Budapest. Her research fields are the history of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe, research on memory and remembrance, and Jewish identity in Hungary and Slovakia. She has authored five monographs, edited ten volumes, published numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals, co-curated exhibitions in Budapest, Berlin, Bratislava, Krems, Prague, Vienna and Warsaw. She is the founder of the audio-visual archive “Voices of the Twentieth Century” in Budapest.
Andrea LÖW
Prof. Dr. Andrea LÖW is the Director of the Center for Holocaust Studies at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich. She also teaches at the University of Mannheim. In 2022, she was the J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Senior Scholar-in Residence at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies (USHMM), Washington, D.C.
Andrea’s academic background is in history and she holds a PhD degree from the University of Bochum. She joined the Institute for Contemporary History in 2007. Before that, she was a researcher at the Research Unit for Holocaust
Literature at the University of Gießen. Andrea´s main research interests are the Holocaust in Eastern Europe, Jewish history during the Holocaust and the history of the ghettos.
Publications include
Deportiert. “Immer mit einem Fuß im Grab“. Erfahrungen deutscher Juden, Frankfurt am Main 2024; Poland under German Occupation 1939-1945. New Perspectives (ed. with Jonathan Huener), New York/Oxford 2024; The Holo caust and European Societies. Social Processes and Social Dynamics, London
2016 (ed. with Frank Bajohr); Das Warschauer Getto. Alltag und Widerstand im Angesicht der Vernichtung, München 2013 (together with Markus Roth); Juden im Getto Litzmannstadt. Lebensbedingungen, Selbstwahrnehmung, Verhalten, Göttingen 2006.
Frédérique LOEW-TURBOUT
Dr. Frédérique LOEW-TURBOUT has a doctorate in social geography and is a research engineer at the MRSH – Université de Caen Normandie. She has been working for over 20 years on multi-disciplinary projects combining social sciences and information technology. As a geographer and cartographer, she is involved in numerous multidisciplinary projects combining history, geography/cartography and digital technologies. A specialist in the Channel and Caribbean sea basins, she is in charge of developing four digital atlases focusing on these cross-border maritime areas. She also co-directs the MRSH maritime research unit.
Nicolas MORZELLE
Nicolas MORZELLE worked as a high school history teacher from 2008 to 2024. Prior to that, he pursued his first Master’s degree at Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne University, where he studied the history of Cameroon during World War II under
the supervision of Professor Pierre Boilley. In September 2023, he submitted his dissertation on the first deportation transport from France for my se cond Master’s degree at Caen-Normandie University, supervised by Professor Gaël Eismann. Starting in October 2024, he began a PhD program under the guidance of Professors Gaël Eismann and François Rouquet, expanding his research to focus on the deportation transports that left France in March and June 1942, prior to the Vel d’Hiv roundup.
Marie MOUTIER-BITAN
Dr. Marie MOUTIER-BITAN holds the Chair of Excellence in “Holocaust and Genocide Studies” at the University of Caen. Her thesis, defended at the EHESS in December 2021, focused on the first violence against Jews in June-July 1941 in Eastern Galicia. She has carried out more than 25 research trips to Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Moldova, Poland and Lithuania as part of her work with the Yahad – In Unum association for 10 years. She participated as a postdoctoral researcher in the H2020 project “Visual History of the Holocaust”. She was a postdoctoral researcher at the Claims Conference Saul Kagan Fellowship in Shoah Advanced Studies where she began to work on the Dniester as a site of massacre and deportation of Jews during the Shoah. She is co-leader of the Holocaust Diaries Project with Sarah Gruszka. The project H-Diaries has just obtained FRAL ANR-DFG funding, with Sarah Gruszka, Judith Lyon-Caen (EHESS) and Andrea Löw (IfZ).
Françoise PASSERA
Françoise PASSERA is a research engineer at the University of Caen Norman dy (HisTeMé, EA 7455). Her research focuses on testimony and the history of Normandy during the Second World War and the immediate post-war period.
Julia ROGER
Dr. Julia ROGER is a research engineer specializing in the analysis of histori cal and cultural sources at the Digital Document division of the Maison de la Recherche en Sciences Humaines in Caen (CNRS – Université de Caen Nor mandie). She works as part of a team on the digital aspects of humanities and social sciences research projects involving the Digital Document division. With a background in both applied literature for publishing techniques (DESS in ap plied Literature for publishing techniques) and Philosophy (a PhD on Descartes under the supervision of Vincent Carraud), she developed an early interest in documentary engineering and the technical methods used in academic publishing. Alongside her research and engineering work, she teaches in the Humanities bachelor’s program, specializing in Digital Humanities, as well as in the master’s program «Book and Publishing Professions» at the Université de Caen Normandie. She is also part of the Steering Committee of Equipex+ Biblissima+.
Robert ROZETT
Dr. Robert ROZETT is Senior Historian in the International Institute for Ho locaust Research at Yad Vashem. Prior to this, for 25 years beginning late in 1992, he was director of the Yad Vashem Libraries, and has been at Yad Vashem since 1981 in various capacities.
He obtained his BA from Rutgers College, Rutgers University (1978) and received his MA (1981) and PhD (1987) from the Hebrew University, where he stu died with Yehuda Bauer. His dissertation was about Jewish Rescue and Revolt in Slovakia and Hungary.
Among his scholarly publications are Conscripted Slaves, Hungarian Jewish Forced Laborers on the Eastern Front During the Second World War (Yad Va shem, 2013), which was a runner up for the US National Jewish Book Award for 2014 in the category of Holocaust Research. His more recent books are After So Much Pain and Anguish, First Letters after Liberation, which he edited with Dr. Iael Nidam Orvieto (Yad Vashem 2016) and Jewish Solidarity (Yad Vashem 2022) which he edited with Dan Michman. His most recent scholarly articles are: “Competitive Victimhood and Holocaust Distortion,” Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs 2022; and “Information About the Holocaust in Hungary Before the German Occupation, Revisited,” The Journal of Holocaust Research, 36:1, 2022 and “Growth of Antisemitism in Hungary Since 1918,” Cambridge History of Antisemitism, Steven Katz (ed.), Cambridge University Press (forthcoming). Dr. Rozett is an adjunct at Yeshiva University and lectures around the world. He serves as the historical adviser to the Echoes and Reflections educational program, is a member of Israel’s delegation to IHRA and served as chairman of the IHRA Academic Working Group in 2023.
Anna ULLRICH
Dr. Anna ULLRICH joined the Mandel Center in 2024 as the director of Interna tional Academic Programs. Together with her team, she is promoting the vita lity of international research in the field of Holocaust Studies through research workshops, international conferences, and programs supporting scholars and scholarship in Ukraine.
The research of Dr. Ullrich focuses on German Jewish associations during the interwar period as well as German Jewish experiences of antisemitism in the prewar years.
Previously, Dr. ULLRICH was a research associate at the Center for Holocaust
Studies at the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History in Munich where she served as a program manager and led several projects for the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI). These included organizing and overseeing the implementation of EHRI’s fellowship program, methodological seminars and online courses, and establishing a sustainable research strategy based on trends and challenges in the field of Holocaust research.
Nicolas VALLOIS
Dr. Nicolas VALLOIS is Assistant Professor at the Université Picardie Jules Verne in France. His research focuses on the work of Jewish statisticians and economists in Germany and Eastern Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century. More generally, he is interested in the economic representations as sociated with Jews and Judaism, and the influence of anti-Jewish stereotypes and antisemitism on the history of economic thought.