Staff Bios

Jonathan Brent, Executive Director, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research

Dr. Brent (Ph.D., The University of Chicago, 1980) became the Executive Director of YIVO in 2009. From 1991 to 2009, he was an editor and then both Editorial Director and Associate Director of Yale University Press. He is the founder of the world acclaimed Annals of Communism series, which he established at Yale Press in 1991. Read more on yivo.org...

Nijolė Bliūdžiuvienė, EBYVOC Project Manager, Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania

Dr. Bliūdžiuvienė has worked at the National Library since 1989. Since 2016, she has been the Director of the Information Sciences Department. From 2014-2016, she was the Director of the Centre of Bibliography and Book Science

Devora Geller, Digital Preservation Manager

Dr. Geller holds a Ph.D. in musicology from The Graduate Center, CUNY.  She has researched and published on Yiddish theater music in America, and has received awards from the Music Library Association and the American Association for Jewish Research.  Geller has also served as an Adjunct Lecturer at Brooklyn College and a Quantitative Reasoning Fellow at Hostos Community College.  She is proficient in Yiddish and French.

Stefanie Halpern, Director, YIVO Archives

Stefanie Halpern is the Director of the YIVO Archives at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York. She received her PhD from the Jewish Theological Seminary in 2017.

Saul Hankin, Digital Projects Specialist

Hankin studied Yiddish as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan – where he double-majored in History and Judaic Studies – and in the advanced class of the Kadar summer program at Tel Aviv University. He has also studied Hebrew, German, and Polish. Hankin holds an M.A. in Jewish Studies from Columbia University, and an M.S. in Information Science from the University of Michigan. He was previously a graduate fellow at the Yiddish Book Center, a Yiddish Book Center translation fellow, and a summer intern at YIVO.

Phil Karolak, Digital Lab Technician

Karolak is a certified computer programmer with a BS in Business Administration, where he graduated with honors from a concentration in management and finance. Karolak has worked in the Imaging industry for 10 years with experience in administration, service, support, technical processing, production and management. He has experience in all phases of digitization projects for a breadth of material types. He has worked the last 6 years for Smooth Solutions, doing preparation, scanning, indexing, quality control, training, production management, editing and delivery for digitization projects.

Lara Lempert (Lempertiene), YIVO Archivist in Lithuania

Lempert has been a senior bibliographer at the Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania since 1995. She has been a lecturer at Vilnius University since 1993 and is the recipient of numerous academic scholarships. She is fluent in Russian, Lithuanian, Hebrew, English, Polish, has a reading knowledge of Yiddish and Ukrainian and holds an M.A. in Philology and a Ph.D in history from Vilnius State University . Lara is also the curator of a traveling exhibition about YIVO, which has been shown in museums in Vilnius, Krakow, and Kiev. In 2015, Lara was honored by the Lithuanian Jewish community for her work to perpetuate Jewish cultural heritage for future generations. She is now the director of the Judaica Research Centre at the National Library.

Violet Lutz, Project Archivist

Violet Lutz holds a Ph.D. in Germanic Languages and Literatures from the University of Pennsylvania, and an MLS from Queens College, CUNY, with a concentration in Archives. She previously worked as a manuscripts cataloger in the Rare Book & Manuscripts Library at the University of Pennsylvania, and as Special Collections Librarian at the German Society of Pennsylvania. Beginning in 2012 she was a processing archivist at the Center for Jewish History, before joining the Vilna Project in 2015. She is near-fluent in German, with experience reading old-style German handwriting (Kurrentschrift), is proficient in Yiddish, and has a reading knowledge of French.

Jessica Podhorcer, Project Archivist

Podhorcer has a B.A. from Brandeis University, where she majored in History and minored in Judaic Studies. She is proficient in Yiddish with a working knowledge of Hebrew and German. Her previous archival experience includes working at the JDC Archives and the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People.

Tatiana Popova, Preservation Manager

Popova has worked in archival conservation for YIVO and the Center for Jewish History for over 15 years, with experience in paper and book conservation. She received professional training at the Center for Jewish History and the Center for Book Arts and is fluent in English and Russian.

Allison Hope Richards, Project Conservator

Allison Hope Richards received a Masters of the Arts in Jewish studies through the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Columbia University in Fall 2018. She also received a Bachelors in American History from Purchase College in the Spring 2010, specializing in East Asian studies (modern China and Japan), Jewish studies and Mandarin Chinese. During her time at Purchase, she worked closely with the Classical Voice program through the Conservatory of Music and served as a figure model for drawing classes through the School of Continuing Education and the School of the Arts. During her time at Columbia, she performed with the chamber choir, Collegium Musicum, studying music ranging from Christian liturgy to Slavic folksong. She is an alumna of both the YIVO Summer Program (2013) and the Yiddish emersion program at Yiddish Farm in New Hampton, NY. She also served as an intern under the direction of Robert Lee at the Asian American Arts Centre located on the Lower East Side.

Yakov Sklar, Archival Processing Manager

Sklar worked as a processing archivist at the Center for Jewish History from 2005 to 2015. From 2012-2015, he was a senior project archivist. He is a native-speaker of Russian and Ukrainian and is pursuing a Ph.D. in Information Studies at Long Island University.

Vital Zajka, Information Manager in the Archives, Photo Archives & Library

Zajka has thirteen years experience as an archivist for the Center for Jewish History and its partner organizations. He is an ASA certified archivist and has an M.A. in Library and Information Science from the Pratt Institute. Aside from his technical skills, he is fluent in Russian, Yiddish, Hebrew, Polish, and German, with proficiency in French and Lithuanian.