Join the Claims Conference, the Leo Baeck Institute, and the editors and contributors of the newly published book for a discussion about the experiences of German and Austrian older adults during and after the Holocaust.

How did older German and Austrian Jews experience the Holocaust? What do we know about care for older and aging survivors immediately after the Holocaust? How has this history informed the efforts of the Claims Conference on behalf of Jewish Holocaust survivors over the years? The volume editors and contributors, all Holocaust historians, will discuss these and other questions at the launch of their groundbreaking book that explores the multifaceted lives of elderly Jewish victims and survivors, Older Jews and the Holocaust: Persecution, Displacement, and Survival (Wayne State University Press, coming out on March 17, 2026).

Books will be available for purchase and signing.

With Assistance from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany

Supported by the German Federal Ministry of Finance

Project Partners: The Ernst Hecht Charitable Foundation, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Wiener Holocaust Library.

About the Speakers
Dr. Elizabeth Anthony is the director of Visiting Scholar Programs at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies. Her book, The Compromise of Return: Viennese Jews after the Holocaust, was co-published by Wayne State University Press and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2021 and was a commended finalist for The Wiener Holocaust Library’s Ernst Fraenkel Book Prize. Anthony was co-editor of and a contributor to Freilegungen: Spiegelungen der NS-Verfolgung und ihrer Konsequenzen, Jahrbuch des International Tracing Service (2015). She also has published chapters in Lessons and Legacies Volume XII (2017); The Future of Holocaust Memorialization: Confronting Racism, Antisemitism, and Homophobia through Memory Work (2015); and the Nürnberger Institut für NS-Forschung und jüdische Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts Jahrbuch 2010. Anthony received a PhD in history at Clark University in 2016.

Dr. Michael Geheran is Associate Professor of History and Deputy Director of the Resnick Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the United States Military Academy at West Point. He is the author of Comrades Betrayed: Jewish World War I Veterans under Hitler (Cornell, 2020) and a contributing co-editor of Beyond Inclusion and Exclusion: Jewish Experiences of the First World War in Central Europe (Berghahn, 2018). He is currently completing a digital history of General Roméo Dallaire’s leadership during the Rwandan Genocide.

Dr. Christine Schmidt is Acting Co-Director of The Wiener Holocaust Library. Her research has focused on the history of postwar tracing and documentation efforts, the concentration camp system in Nazi Germany, and comparative studies of collaboration and resistance in France and Hungary. She is currently writing a social history and archival biography of a collection of survivor accounts recorded by The Wiener Library in the 1950s-60s. She has a forthcoming chapter in Holocaust Memory in the United Kingdom in the 1960s (Bloomsbury, 2025). Schmidt has recently published articles in the Journal of Transport History, the European Review of History, American Imago, Culture Unbound, and The Journal of Holocaust Research, and is co-editing (with Sandra Lipner, Clara Dijkstra, and Charlie Knight) Letters and the Holocaust: Methodology, Cases, and Reflections (Bloomsbury, 2025) and (with Suzanne Bardgett and Dan Stone) Survivors of Nazi Persecution - Beyond Camps and Forced Labour (Palgrave, 2025).

Dr. Joanna Sliwa is a Historian at the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) where she also administers the Saul Kagan Fellowship in Advanced Shoah Studies, and the University Partnership in Holocaust Studies. Joanna’s research concerns the history of the Claims Conference, compensation for Holocaust survivors, and Jewish property restitution. Joanna's own scholarship focuses on the Holocaust in Poland and on Polish Jewish history. She is the author of Jewish Childhood in Kraków: A Microhistory of the Holocaust (Rutgers University Press, 2021), which received the 2020 Ernst Fraenkel Prize from The Wiener Holocaust Library, and The Counterfeit Countess: The Jewish Woman Who Rescued Thousands of Poles during the Holocaust (with Elizabeth White; Simon and Schuster, 2024).

Chen Yurista is Chief Experience Officer at the Claims Conference. An attorney, licensed to practice in Israel and in the US, Chen previously served as the Executive Director of the Israeli office of the Claims Conference, worked on the Swiss Banks settlement, and was the CEO of the Foundation for the Benefit of Holocaust Victims in Israel. He graduated with honors from the faculties of Law and Economics at Tel Aviv University and holds an MBA from The Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. In his current position Chen continually evaluates practices, methods and strategies to improve the Claims Conference’s interactions with survivors in over 45 countries. Chen is a third generation to Holocaust survivors from Poland and from Germany.