Sergii Gurbych is a doctoral student of Jewish Studies at the University of Heidelberg. He has an MA in Jewish Studies (2017) from the same university. His research interests include comparative literary studies, identity studies and migration policy in Israel, Eastern Europe and the US. His dissertation on “Transculturality in post-Soviet emigrant literature in English, German and Hebrew”, on which he is currently working, studies the way national identity is reflected in literature written by immigrants in the language of their host countries.

Rebekka Hahn has a diploma in translation studies and has passed the 2nd state grammar school (“Gymnasium”) and comprehensive school (“Gesamtschule”) teacher’s examination. In the summer of 2019, she exchanged her rewarding and worthwhile job working as a teacher of English, French and art for the post of research assistant at the Faculty of Educational Science at the University of Bielefeld. She is also a research assistant at the Museum of Russian-German Cultural History in Detmold. She works as a voluntary ambassador for International Justice Mission, a human rights organization.

Rebekka Hahn loves books and music, as well as dancing and traveling. She has a passion for learning and teaching, and for people’s life stories. As an exponent of biography research, she is fascinated by the way we become who we are, and yet never stay that way, and by what supports and motivates us. Her research focuses on how a sense of belonging and a commitment to values are intertwined. In her dissertation project, she is studying the everyday environments and life journeys of young, second-generation Russian-German women.

For more information, see: 
https://www.uniklinikum-leipzig.de/einrichtungen/medizinische-psychologie/Seiten/kontaktseite-nesterko.aspx
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Yuriy_Nesterko

Jonna Rock is a sociolinguist, ethnologist and cultural scientist. Her monography, International Memory and Language of the Sarajevo Sephardim (Palgrave Macmillan), which appeared in July 2019 and which is based on her doctoral thesis at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, examines how Jews and Sarajevo are redeveloping and redefining their self-identity since the fall of communism. Jonna has also produced a film, A Sarajevo Jewish Story, which is also based on her research. The film was shown at the Sarajevo Film Festival (2018), the London Wiener Library (2019), and elsewhere.

Currently, Jonna is conducting research on the people who assisted members of the Jewish community in the former Yugoslavia, on behalf of the Silent Heroes Memorial Center in the German Resistance Memorial Center in Berlin. As a Sylke Tempel Fellowship scholar at the German-Israeli Future Forum in 2019, Jonna researched the interaction between different Russian-speaking actors in Berlin.

Liza Rozovsky was born in Moscow, moved to Israel aged 10, and grew up in Jerusalem. She started her own family in a suburb of Tel Aviv, but at 38 made the life-changing decision to move to Dresden, where she now lives with her husband and two children. Liza Rozovsky has spent most of her professional career working as a journalist, for TV, radio, the Internet and print media. While she is used to talking and reporting mainly in Russian and Hebrew, she hopes to continue to write about a wide range of issues in different languages, as long as she is able and in whichever country she has the possibility of doing so.