Irina Rebrova
Margee and Douglas Greenberg Research Fellowship
2017-2018

Irina Rebrova is a Ph.D. candidate at the Center for Research on Anti-Semitism at Technical University in Berlin, Germany. The working title of her thesis is “Memory about the Holocaust in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russian Discourses on World War II (the Case of North Caucasus)”. She holds a Russian degree (candidate of science in history) and MA in sociology (Gender studies). Rebrova also holds an MA in sociology from European Humanities University and has completed fellowships at the Claims Conference, the Center for Holocaust Studies at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). 

 

Rebrova researched the process of remembrance and translation of the memory about the Holocaust in the North Caucasus, South of Russia, during her time in residence at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide ResearchShe studied the mechanism of storytelling by Holocaust survivors interviewed by the Shoah Foundation in the early Post-Soviet states in the 1990s. Most of the Soviet Jews lived their whole lives (or the significant part their adult lives before it could be possible to emigrate after the breakup of the USSR) in the Soviet Union, where the theme of mass extermination of the Jews especially within the internal borders has been silenced. In this context, Rebrova’s research explored the role of these interviews in the construction of social memory of the Holocaust in the Soviet Jewish community and wider in the post-Soviet society.