YIVO Institute for Jewish Research

The 2010 Jan Karski & Pola Nirenska Prize at YIVO Awarded to Joanna Nalewajko-Kulikov

(June, 2010) The Award Committee of the Jan Karski and Pola Nirenska Award has the pleasure to announce that Dr. Joanna Nalewajko-Kulikov of Warsaw, Poland, is this year’s recipient of the Jan Karski and Pola Nirenska prize. Endowed by Professor Jan Karski at YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in 1992, the $5,000 prize goes to authors of published works documenting Polish-Jewish relations and Jewish contributions to Polish culture.

The winner was chosen by the Award Committee, whose members are Prof. Jerzy Tomaszewski, Prof. Feliks Tych, Dr. Eleonora Bergman (director, Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw), Dr. Jonathan Brent (director, YIVO Institute), and Marek Web (YIVO Institute). The award ceremony will be held in September at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw.

Born in 1976 in Warsaw, Dr. Nalewajko-Kulikov is Assistant Professor at the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences. She is also associated with the Jewish Historical Institute and with the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, and she collaborates with other research institutions in various countries that specialize in the history of Jews in Poland and the Holocaust. Dr. Nalewajko-Kulikov’s fields of interest are, among others, Yiddish-based Jewish culture in Poland in the 19th and 20th centuries, Polish Jews during the Holocaust, the Jewish community in Poland during the postwar period until 1968, and Polish-Jewish relations. She is the author of several monographs, including Strategie przetrwania. Zydzi po aryjskiej stronie Warszawy (Strategies of Survival: Jews on the Aryan Side in Warsaw, 2004), and Obywatel Jidyszlandu. Rzecz o zydowskich komunistach w Polsce (Citizen of the Yiddishland: About the Jewish Communists in Poland, 2009). Strategies of Survival received prestigious awards from the Polish Ministry of National Education and the Aleksander Gieysztor Foundation. Citizen of Yiddishland is a biography of the Yiddish poet and leader of the Jewish community in Poland prior to 1968, Dawid Sfard, intertwined with the community’s history until its disintegration in 1968 in the wake of a government-supported antisemitic campaign.

The late Professor Jan Karski, the founder of the prize at YIVO, was the envoy of the Polish government-in-exile during World War II, who brought to the West firsthand testimony about the conditions in the Warsaw Ghetto and in German death camps. The prize is also named in memory of Professor Karski's late wife, choreographer Pola Nirenska.

Founded in 1925, in Vilna (Wilno, Poland; now Vilnius, Lithuania), as the Yiddish Scientific Institute, YIVO is dedicated to the study of the history and culture of Ashkenazic Jewry and its influence in the Americas. Headquartered in New York City since 1940, today YIVO is the preeminent global resource center for East European Jewish Studies; Yiddish language, literature, and ethnography; and the American Jewish immigrant experience. The YIVO Library holds more than 385,000 volumes; the Archives holds about 20 million archival items.