Anca Filipovici joins the Archive as Fortunoff/VWI Fellow in Vienna

By Christy Bailey-Tomecek - November 21, 2022

Anca Filipovici is a Fortunoff research fellow at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute (October 2020 – June 2023) and researcher at the Romanian Institute of Research on National Minorities (Cluj-Napoca, Romania – since 2017). In July 2018, she was a short-term EHRI fellow at the Center for Holocaust Studies at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, while in 2018-2019 she received a fellowship of the New Europe College in Bucharest.

Since 2013, she holds a PhD in history at the Babeş-Bolyai University of Cluj, with a published thesis called Cărturarii provinciei. Intelectuali și cultură locală în nordul Moldovei interbelice [The Scribes of the Province. Intellectuals and Local Culture in Northern Moldavia] (Iaşi, European Institute, 2015). In 2018, she edited, together with Attila Gidó, the volume Trecutul Prezent. Evreii din România: istorie, memorie, reprezentare [The Present Past. The Jews in Romania: History, Memory, Representation] (Cluj-Napoca, RIRNM Publishing House, 2018). She is also the author of several articles and studies exploring ethnicity and antisemitism in interwar Romania. Her latest paper entitled “‘Faith and work for King and Country!’ Nationalization and covert Romanianization through the youth organization Straja Țării (1934–1940)” was published in National ldentities (2021, vol. 23, no. 4).

Anca's current project explores the history of the Holocaust in Romania from the perspective of Jewish youth as an agency of resistance. It focuses on Jewish underground youth organizations and other political movements that were active during the Second World War. A focus is placed on young Romanian Jews outside the ghettos, but also on those who were deported to Transnistria; on those who considered the possibility of a new life in Romania or fought for emigration to Eretz Israel. Based on archival files and survivors' testimonies from the Fortunoff Video Archive, the project will create a typology of these organizations. It will examine the mobilizing factors and analyze the relationship between youth and political engagement. It raises the question of the nature of ethnic and religious identity when this identity transforms the individual into a victim.
Please join us in welcoming Anca to the Fortunoff Video Archive.