Katarzyna Czerwonogóra
Katarzyna Czerwonogóra is a historian of modern Jewish history whose work explores Polish-Jewish relations, gender, and national identity in Central and Eastern Europe. She holds a PhD in Jewish History from Tel Aviv University and an MA in Sociology from the Jagiellonian University in Kraków.
During her MA studies in Kraków (2003–2009), she was actively involved in Jewish communal life. She participated in the post-communist Jewish revival in Poland, including leadership roles in a local Jewish youth organization. Her MA thesis examined the Jewish revival in Poland from a feminist perspective, with a particular focus on Kraków, combining sociological analysis with questions of memory, identity, and minority presence in a predominantly Catholic society.
Since moving to Israel in 2013, Katarzyna has been engaged in Holocaust education and research. Between 2019 and 2025, she worked at Yad Vashem – The World Holocaust Remembrance Center, where she held several research and educational positions. Most notably, she served as Educational Coordinator at the Polish Desk of the International Institute for Holocaust Education, where she developed and coordinated Holocaust education programs for Polish audiences and collaborated with Polish educators, institutions, and civil society initiatives. She has also worked as an indexer of Holocaust testimonies for the USC Shoah Foundation.
Her scholarly publications address Jewish women’s activism, Zionism and feminism, women’s experiences during the Holocaust, and Jewish cultural life in Poland and Europe. Her research is interdisciplinary and multilingual, engaging historical, sociological, and memory-studies perspectives. Fellowships from Bar-Ilan University, the Leo Baeck Fellowship Program, and the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute have supported her work.
As part of the Christosemitism project, Katarzyna investigates Catholic responses to antisemitism and the Jewish question in Poland from the 1980s through the post-communist transformation. Her current project, Modern despite or thanks to Catholic tradition? Jewish question and Polish national identity, 1980–2000, explores the post-1989 “pro-Jewish turn” in Polish identity discourse from a postsecular perspective. It examines how efforts to integrate Jewish history and memory into the Polish national imagination drew on moral and symbolic resources rooted in post–Vatican II Catholic theology and the anti-antisemitic turn associated with John Paul II.