Memory Activism & Public Remembrance

Witold Wrzosinski (M) holds an MA in Hebrew Studies from Warsaw University. He is the director of the Okopowa Jewish Cemetery in Warsaw, one of the largest Jewish cemeteries in the world. He serves as a member of the Board of the Union of Jewish Communities in Poland and Jewish Community of Warsaw. At the same time Witold runs the Foundation for Documentation of Jewish Cemeteries, which has indexed and published more than 115,000 inscriptions from over 110 cemeteries all over Poland, complete with transcriptions, photographs and locations. He has also taken part in dozens of educational programs and conferences, as well as published works on Polish Jewish matters in popular and scholarly publications. At the same time, he created the Hebrew transcription system for the Core Exhibit of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews POLIN and worked on the exhibits at the Brodno Jewish Cemetery and the Tarnow Jewish Cemetery.

Cathy Del Rizzo is the Training Coordinator at CEJI. With formal and non-formal educational backgrounds in training, youth work, art and theatre, Cathy has been working as an anti-bias trainer since 2014. She is currently focusing on training delivery, educational program development, network development and activities in Belgium. She has been involved in designing and implementing numerous workshops, trainings and train-the-trainer courses on combating prejudices and discrimination.

Aga Jablonska - is a co-founder and executive director of the Urban Memory Foundation (UMF) in Wrocław, Poland. UMF is an NGO dealing with the heritage of the pre-war Jewish community of Breslau, today Wrocław. She also co- founded the Engaged Memory Consortium aimed at proposing an innovative approach to remembrance. Aga is a manager and cultural activist. For two years (2019-2021) she worked for an Israeli-Palestinian educational programme MEET - The Middle East Entrepreneurs of Tomorrow. Previously she had a ten-year professional career in Brussels, where she specialized in event management and communication strategies involving European Union programs and institutions. Aga holds a double M.A. degree, in Political Science from the University of Wrocław and in Jewish Civilizations from the Hochschule für Jüdische Studien Heidelberg. She is the co-author of the publication “Breslau / Wrocław 1933–1949. Studien zur Topographie der Shoah". In 2017-2018 she completed the One-Year-Program at the European Institute for Jewish Studies in Sweden - Paideia. In 2019, Aga was awarded a Nahum Goldmann Fellowship; since 2017 she is a member of the international Jewish network - ROI Community, a Schusterman Family Philanthropies initiative.

Aleksandra (Ola) Janus - holds a PhD in Anthropology from the Jagiellonian University in Cracow (Poland). She works at the intersections of academia, art, and activism. As an academic, she collaborates closely with the Research Center for Memory Cultures (Jagiellonian University) and is a member of the global network and project "Thinking Through The Museum" and the editorial board of the Jagiellonian/Columbia University book series “Exhibiting Theory”. She is President of the Zapomniane Foundation aimed at locating, marking, and commemorating forgotten burial sites of the Holocaust victims in Poland. She co-founded Engaged Memory Consortium aimed at creating and proposing an innovative approach to remembrance – one that underscores the relevance of remembering for social justice and facing contemporary challenges. She is co-curator of the ‘Exercising modernity’ program aimed at critically rethinking the legacy of modernity in Poland, Germany, and Israel. She co-founded and curated the ‘Museum Lab’ (Laboratorium muzeum) - an educational program in critical museology for Polish heritage professionals. Recently, she also co-founded two initiatives advocating for heritage institutions to take action in the face of the climate crisis: the working group Museums for the Climate and Culture for Climate collective.