Shimon-Peres-Prize: Jury 2023-2025
Photo © Susie Knoll
Tamar Hay-Sagiv is the deputy director general for education at the Peres Center for Peace & Innovation where she manages the organization’s education programs and initiatives.
As part of her ongoing work at the Peres Center, she brings her knowledge, methodologies, and best practices to the table for the benefit of other organizations and serves as an external consultant for NGO’s, educational frameworks, and municipalities. In her day-to-day, Hay-Sagiv works closely with the director general of the Peres Center, providing support and leadership to the wider Peres Center team. She joined the center in April 2007 as a project manager, focusing on peace education through sports and development programs. She studied political science and public policy at the Tel Aviv University. Tamar Hay-Sagiv was born 1980 in Tel Aviv.
Photo © Peres Center for Peace & Innovation
Hèdi Bouden is a teacher, theater producer, and cultural educator in Hamburg. For more than 10 years, he has been developing and leading international youth, theater, film, and educational projects.
As the founder and director of projects such as “Architecture of Hope”, he has been creating artistic spaces for encounter, remembrance, and exchange, particularly since October 7, 2023. Furthermore, since 2024, he has been a member of the Hamburg State Integration Advisory Board as an expert on anti-discrimination and racism. At the Ernst Deutsch Theater, he works as a director in the youth division and leads the youth theater club.
For his personal dedication, he has been honored with awards such as the Margot Friedländer Personality Award and the German Dream Award. The German-Israeli theater collaboration "Where does the hate come from?", directed by Hèdi Bouden, was awarded the Shimon Peres Prize in 2023.
Photo © Marcus Mainz / Margot Friedländer Stiftung
Laura Cazés is the Head of the Communications and Digitalization Department at the Central Welfare Office of the Jews in Germany (ZWST).
As an author and speaker, Laura Cazés explores the diversity of Jewish communities in Germany. In 2022, S. Fischer published the anthology she edited, “We Have Not Remained Safe: Being Jewish in Germany”. In addition, she works as a freelance moderator and has hosted several podcasts, among others for Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR).
Photo © Robert Poticha
Sa’eed Diabat is a Senior Program Manager at JDC Israel (The Joint), dedicating his work to tackling systemic barriers and driving sustainable community and economic development within Israel’s Arab community.
Alongside his work, he has been a driving force for grassroots initiatives since 2013, when he founded the Averroes Community Development NGO. Through Averroes, he established "Youth for Change Galilee," a cultural exchange project that builds bridges and fosters dialogue between Arab and Jewish youth in Israel and youth in Germany.
Sa’eed Diabat is a Salzburg Global Fellow and serves as a member of the “Play for Peace” global leadership council. He has an academic background in Behavioral Sciences, Youth at Risk Education and Organizational Behavior and Development.
Photo © Eric Sultan
Yasmeen Godder is a choreographer and performer whose internationally acclaimed works have been presented at leading venues and festivals worldwide.
Photo © Eyal Tagar
Christine Mähler is the head of ConAct, the nationwide coordination center for German-Israeli youth exchange.
She is a psychologist, mediator, and supervisor and conducted research on the impact of the Holocaust on members of the second generation of Jewish Holocaust Survivors in Germany and Israel. For 40 years, she has been organizing and reflecting on German-Israeli exchanges. Christine Mähler served as national chair of the Youth Forum of the German-Israeli Society (DIG) and as vice president of the DIG. Professionally, she has supported the Israel Volunteer Program at Action Reconciliation Service for Peace and helped establish an international youth exchange center in Sachsenhausen, Oranienburg. Christine Mähler lived and studied in Israel for two years.
Photo © ConAct / Ruthe Zuntz
He has appeared in numerous feature films, such as the psychothriller Das Experiment. He is best known to international audiences in his roles in the Oscar-nominated historical drama Downfall and Inglorious Basterds, where he acted alongside Brad Pitt and Christoph Waltz, among others. He also appeared alongside Isabelle Huppert in Elle, the French film nominated for an Oscar. After his authorial debut Der Apfelbaum (The Apple Tree) in 2018, his second novel Ada was published in 2020. Christian Berkel lives with his family in Berlin.
photo: © Stefan Klüter
photo: © CCC Filmkunst Daniela Incoronato
He holds a B.A from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and an M.A. in Peace and Conflict Studies from Haifa University.
Since 2004, he has been an independent member of the board of directors of the Turkish daily Hürriyet; since 2011 he has served as non-executive director of the London Times; since 2017 as member of the Public Policy Advisory Board, UBER, San Francisco.
In addition, Diekmann has written and edited several books.
photo: © Daniel Eliasson
Daniel Donskoy is an actor and musician. Born in Moscow in 1990 and raised in Berlin and Tel Aviv, he became aware of political issues - especially questions of integration and antisemitism - at a young age. His late-night show Freitagnacht Jews (WDR) was awarded with the German Television Prize in 2021 and the Grimme Prize in 2022.
Donskoy's most recent projects include the series Schlafschafe (ZDFneo), Barbaren (Netflix) and A Small Light (Disney+). He is known for his work in Dror Zahavi's feature film Crescendo, the US series Strike Back, the Netflix hit The Crown, the RTL series Sankt Maik and the British series Detectorists and Victoria, among others. Donskoy lives in Berlin and London.
Photo © Oliver Look
photo: © Heike Steinweg
Kerstin Griese is a politician of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) and member of the German parliament. Since 2018, she has been Parliamentary State Secretary to the Federal Minister of Labor and Social Affairs.
Photo © Inga Haar
Sara von Schwarze has won many awards for her acting, among them the Tel Aiviv-Yaffo Municipality Award in the name of Abraham Ben Yossef, which she received five times.
He has written numerous publications on numismatics and the history of Jews in Germany.
© Stiftung Neue Synagoge Berlin – Centrum Judaicum. Photo: Anna Fischer
Andrea Kiewel is a German TV presenter, columnist, and author. Since the early 2000s, she has hosted the Fernsehgarten show on ZDF. For her work, she was twice awarded with the German media prize Goldene Henne and, in 2021, with the German Television Award.
She has hosted many television shows, including Das ist mein Israel (2016), the ZDF New Year's show Willkommen (2015-2022), and served as a guest judge on Das Supertalent (2021). Her books Mama, Du bist nicht der Bestimmer (2006) and Meist sonnig - Eine Liebeserklärung an das Leben (2021) were on the Spiegel bestseller list for several weeks. As editor-in-chief, she was responsible for the special issue Women of the Jüdische Allgemeine. In her childhood, she was a competitive swimmer, and she is actively involved with WIZO and Aleh Negev. Andrea Kiewel was born in Berlin in 1965. She currently lives in Israel.
Photo © Markus Höhn
Previously, he served as the Israeli Consul General to New England at the Boston Consulate and held positions at the Israeli Embassy in Washington. He also served as Policy Assistant to three different Foreign Ministers – Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak, and David Levy.
Tamir holds a B.A. in Philosophy and Political Science and an M.A. in Public Administration from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He is a board member of Mitvim – The Israeli Institute for Regional Foreign Policies and on the steering committee of the Geneva Initiative.
Igor Levit is a multi-award-winning pianist (Gilmore Artist Award, Opus Classic Prize, International Beethoven Prize) and activist against antisemitism. Since 2019, he has been professor of piano at his alma mater, the Hanover University of Music, Drama and Media. Levit is co-artistic director of the Heidelberger Frühling music festival and curator of the Lucerne Piano Festival.
He performs regularly in the world's most prestigious concert halls, at festivals, and appears as a guest with leading orchestras. The documentary Igor Levit - No Fear premiered in 2022. In the spring of 2021, Levit published his first book Hauskonzert. In collaboration with Bayerischer Rundfunk, his podcasts 32x Beethoven as well as Variationen – Alles wird anders were created. His 53 house concerts, which he streamed on Twitter during the lockdown in spring 2020, received international acclaim. For these, as well as for his commitment against antisemitism and right-wing extremism, Igor Levit was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit in 2020. He was born in Nizhni Novgorod in 1987 and moved to Germany with his family as a child.
Photo © Felix Broede, Sony Classical
Pola Sarah Nathusius is a distribution and social media strategist at the German public TV station ARD.
During and after her studies of political science and American studies in Frankfurt, she worked for many years as an editor, author, and moderator for the national German TV stations ARD and ZDF. For the Federal Agency for Civic Education (BpB), she hosted the podcast Jüdisches Leben in Deutschland (Jewish Life in Germany). Pola Sarah Nathusius got to know Israel during several stays, among others at a journalist trip of the BpB. The Ernst Cramer & Teddy Kollek Fellowship (2016) also took her to Israel. During the fellowship, she also worked for the international TV station i24News in Jaffa. After a traineeship at Hessischer Rundfunk, she lived in Tel Aviv from 2019 to 2020. Pola Sarah Nathusius was born in Wiesbaden in 1989 and currently lives in Frankfurt.
Photo © Privat
photo: © Boaz Arad
