Ms. Anna Cichopek

Professional Background

Ms. Anna Cichopek received an M.A. in history from Jagiellonian University of Krakow, Poland and an additional M.A. in history from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. During her fellowship at the Museum, she was a Ph.D. candidate in the History Department and Frankel Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She also served as Director for Poland for the Foundation of Remembrance and Reconciliation, which seeks to restore Jewish heritage in Poland. For her Charles H. Revson Foundation Fellowship for Archival Research, Ms. Cichopek conducted research on her project “Jews, Poles, Slovaks: A Story of Encounter, 1944-1948.”

The recipient of several esteemed grants and fellowships for her exceptional scholarly work, Ms. Cichopek was awarded the Jan Jozef Lipski Prize for best master’s thesis, the Sheldon Hamburger and Eva Jankelowitz Fellowship, the Ronald and Eileen Weiser Award, the La Med Fund for Yiddish Studies grant, and the Polish National Committee for Scholarly Research Fellowship, among others. In 2000, Ms. Cichopek’s Master’s thesis entitled Pogrom Zydow w Krakowie 11 Sierpnia 1945 was published by the Jewish Historical Institute of Warsaw and her article “The Cracow Pogrom of August 1945: A Narrative Reconstruction” was published in Contested Memories: Poles and Jews during the Holocaust and its Aftermath (Rutgers University Press, 2003). Ms. Cichopek has also completed Yiddish language studies at Columbia University’s Max Weinreich Center for Advanced Jewish Studies.

Fellowship Research

While in residence at the Center, Ms. Cichopek researched the relations between Poles, Jews and Slovaks in their daily lives in the immediate years following the Holocaust. She contextualized the violent post-war Polish pogroms in a broader context of the complex and multi-faceted identities and social interactions in Poland and Slovakia after the war.

Ms. Cichopek was in residence at the Mandel Center from August 1 to October 31, 2005.