Welcome Student Research Scholar Vera Kurczewski

Join us in welcoming Vera Kurczewski to the Fortunoff Archive as a Student Research Scholar.

Vera is an undergraduate student at Columbia University, where she studies twentieth-century  European and Jewish History. As a high school student at Wilbur Cross, Vera became acquainted with the Fortunoff Archive as a Yale Pathways to Arts and Humanities scholar and through her involvement in Aya Marczyk's Race and Citizenship in Nazi Germany and Jim Crow United States course. Later, as a Yale Beinecke Library Ambassador, Vera continued engaging with and reviewed testimony for the Fortunoff Archive's exhibition "In the First Person." Vera continues her archival research within Columbia University's Rare Book & Manuscript Library and the Norman E. Alexander Library for Jewish Studies. She also serves on the Undergraduate Advisory Council at the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

As a Fortunoff Archive Student Research Scholar, Vera's research will examine the individual testimony of Poznań's Jewish residents and their displacement amid the Germanification of the city. To illustrate the transformation of Posen, the German name for Poznań, Vera will explore  the lived effects of antisemitism and migration that resulted in the diminution of Jewish Life in Poznań, Poland. By studying and amplifying testimony, she aims to revive the forgotten Jewish history of Poznań, a history she argues has become effaced from public consciousness. Through her work, Vera also aspires to reposition the scholarly conversation concerning the expulsion of Jews from Poznań.