PROGRAM DIRECTOR

Dekel was born in Tel-Aviv, grew up in New York City and has been living in Berlin since 2002. As chairperson of the Jewish Center Fraenkelufer Synagogue Association, Dekel spearheads efforts to rebuild a community, cultural and arts center on the site of the former main sanctuary of the Kreuzberg Synagogue. Dekel is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity focusing on the complexity and variety of Jewish-Muslim encounters in Berlin.

CREATIVE DIRECTOR

Denalisa Shijaku is a Berlin-based self-taught artist with Albanian roots. Her work explores emotion through vibrant compositions, inviting viewers into a dynamic world of color, form, and materiality.She has exhibited in numerous solo and group shows and is currently represented by several galleries, including Nuo Gallery (Munich), Lyle Gallery (New York), and Gallery 1888 (Toronto).In 2024, she was a fellow of Mar’a’yeh – A Night’s Journey, LABA Berlin’s most recent program. She now serves as Creative Director at LABA Berlin and is co-curating the upcoming exhibition at Künstlerhaus Bethanien together with Olaf Kühnemann.

Foto: credits Viola Patzig

CREATIVE DIRECTOR

Olaf is a painter, winner of the Isracard and Tel Aviv Museum of Art Prize of 2008, and was included in the jurors' pick of the 2014 Thames & Hudson publishing's book, "100 Painters of Tomorrow." Since 2009 Olaf has been living with his family in Berlin, yet continues to work regularly as an artist between Berlin and Tel-Aviv. Olaf "is" Israeli and German, but neither one of these stories fully encapsulate him. Questions about identity formation and constant transformation have been a motivating force and substance throughout his life and practice as an artist. Olaf earned his MFA from the Parsons School of Design in New York.

PROGRAM & OPERATIONS DIRECTOR

Michal Antonovich is an experience designer and project coordinator. Born in Israel and raised in Berlin, where she is currently based, she studied cultural studies before working at the intersection of culture, events, and marketing as a project and content manager for various creative agencies.
Her passion lies in transformative processes and activism that foster both personal and societal well-being. She has explored mindfulness and coaching methodologies and believes in the power of silence and inner wisdom as important pillars of change. Since 2022, she has been co-curating the program of the Pura Vida Festival, a platform dedicated to aligning personal well-being with planetary regeneration.

At LABA Berlin, Michal is responsible for program development and coordination, shaping experiences that invite deep exploration and dialogue. She is also committed to fostering mutual understanding and peacebuilding through her work with Trialogue, a German school project that brings together Israeli-jewish and Palestinian perspectives, aswell as Standing Together Berlin.

PROGRAM & OPERATIONS DIRECTOR

Dennis Sadiq Kirschbaum (he/him) is a community builder, educator and interfaith activist from Berlin. He studied Political Science, Philosophy and Ethics for teaching in Berlin and is working as a freelance trainer on non formal education. He is specialized on Betzavta and Anti-Bias. Born in the GDR, he converted to Islam as a Teenager. From 2014-2018 he performed as a Poetry Slam Artist nation wide. In 2017 he co-founded JUMA e.V. - one of Germanys leading muslim youth empowerment organizations, and served as head of board for four years. In 2021 he co-curated the MuJew (Muslim Jewish) Art Festival in Berlin. He is a day one supporter of Laba Berlin. In 2024-2025 he co-curated an international Muslim-Jewish exchange programm between the Mar´a´yeh 2024 fellows and their counterparts from the, US based, Mandel Foundation. For more than ten years he joined several Muslim - Jewish Alliances  on national and international level such as Muslim Jewish Conference. 

FACILITATOR

For more than 14 years, Lia has pursued her passion for high-impact projects, leadership, and supporting people and business growth. Her mission is clear: to join forces with diverse and talented professionals to drive positive change. Her first leadership experience was at the age of 21 when she led a team of 13 people. She had held pivotal client mandates and operational and leadership roles in VC-funded startups, scale-ups, SMEs, and corporate environments, both pre- and post-IPO.

Lia has a track record of building, scaling, and transforming purpose-driven teams, People/HR functions and organisations. Her expertise focuses on strategy development and execution, next-generation leadership and team development, new work practices and training.

Betül is a rare, original Berliner. By the age of four, she had discovered her insatiable interest in religions, demanding that her parents take her to a church for the first time. During her law studies at the Free University of Berlin, she worked on a number of interreligious projects, including Jung Gläubig Aktiv. There she collaborated with Jews, Christians, Bahá'ís, and other Muslims on religious diversity and visibility in Berlin. Today, alongside her software development studies, she works as an educational officer at the Deutsche Islam Akademie. She is responsible for workshops and training sessions on topics such as diversity, gender equality, identity, inclusion, and Muslim life, additionally focusing on Muslim-Jewish educational initiatives.

Tomer Dotan-Dreyfus is a Haifa-Born, Berlin-based author, poet, translator and literary scholar. Holds a BA in comparative literature and Philosophy and MA in comparative literature, his first Essay book, Meine Forschung zum O (my Research of O) was published in 2022 by Gans Verlag. In 2023 his debut novel, Birobidschan, on a fictional jewish autonomous town in Siberia, was published by Voland & Quist and got nominated for the German Book Prize of 2023. He also publishes opinion pieces in several newspapers, mainly on German memory culture and Israel-Palestine.

Armin is a political educator and scholar of Islamic Theology and Gender Studies, currently working at Deutsche Islam Akademie in Berlin. He studied Islamic Studies and Gender Studies in Frankfurt am Main, Amman, Berlin and London. He is committed to interreligious dialogue, including the Jewish-Muslim dialogue in Berlin. Furthermore, he is a associated fellow at AIWG. In his project „Other Food Stories“ Armin examined with various experts the question of how political food is, in particular with reference to Jewish-Muslim traditions.

Tanja Berg has lived and worked in Berlin for 30 years, taking part in various political and Jewish initiatives. She studied political science. Tanja has worked for many years at various interfaces between education and research, specialising in democracy development, diversity, political education and inter-religious issues. As head of department at Minor, she is responsible for democracy development and political education. Tanja is on the board of the Jewish Center Fraenkelufer Synagogue Association and has long been involved in German-Israeli youth exchange.

Rebecca Rogowski a Berlin, born and raised educator. She has a Bachelor in Jewish Studies and Comparative Literature and is an Alumna of The Pardes Experiential Educators Program. For two years Rebecca has been working as the senior educator at Hillel Germany focusing on making jewish education more accessible for marginalised groups. In addition to her work at Hillel Deutschland Rebecca is very involved in interreligious Dialogue and interreligious education. One of her favourite projects in this field is her interreligious feminist Podcast "331-3 Frauen, 3 Religionen, 1 Thema", which she cohost together with the muslim theologian Kübra Dalkilic and the protestant pastor Maike Schöfer.

Ufuk Topkara is a Muslim theologian and Assistant Professor for Comparative Theology in Islamic Perspective at the Institute for Islamic Theology, Humboldt University in Berlin. Topkara’s research centers on the convergence of reason and revelation and brings Islamic theology into discourse with modern philosophy. In his most recent book Miskawayh’s Tahdib al-ahlaq: Happiness, Justice, and Friendship (Routledge, 2022), Topkara illustrates how Miskawayh, the founder of Islamic Moral Philosophy, integrates and modifies Aristotle’s Ethics into Islamic thought. Through his work at the Jewish Museum Berlin and various other engagements, Topkara has been promoting interreligious dialogue. He was a Humanity in Action Fellow in New York and worked as a Humanity in Action-Lantos Fellow in Washington, D.C. Topkara was educated at Humboldt University of Berlin and Harvard University. He earned his Ph.D. at the Graduate School of Islamic Theology at the University of Paderborn.

Yael is a doctoral fellow at the Research Training Group Minor Cosmopolitanisms at the University of Potsdam. In her current research project, she seeks to trace the constitutive role of Jewish colonial experience in North Africa as formative to Modern French Jewish thought. For many years, Yael has worked as a guide at museums in Israel and Germany, among them, Yad Vashem, ANU museum of the Jewish people and Jewish Museum Berlin. She also co hosts the podcast of her doctoral program called: minor constellations.

Tal Hever-Chybowski is the director of the Paris Yiddish Center — Medem Library (Maison de la culture yiddish — Bibliothèque Medem), in which he also teaches Yiddish literature and Jewish history and culture. In 2016 he founded Mikan Ve’eylakh: Journal for Diasporic Hebrew (Berlin & Paris), of which he is editor-in-chief. In 2017 he founded "Yiddish in Berlin", a summer program for Yiddish language and literature in the Freie Universität Berlin. He is a writer, translator, actor and artist, working in Hebrew, Yiddish, German French and English. His Yiddish poem "Khurbn Gaza" has been translated into twelve languages.

Nahed Samour has studied law and Islamic studies at the universities of Bonn, Birzeit/Ramallah, London (SOAS), Berlin (HU), Harvard and Damascus. She was a doctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt/Main. She clerked at the Court of Appeals in Berlin, and held a Post Doc position at the Eric Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights, Helsinki University, Finland and was Early Career Fellow at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg, Göttingen Institute for Advance Study. She has taught as Junior Faculty at Harvard Law School Institute for Global Law and Policy from 2014-2018. From 2019-2022, she was Core Emerging Investigator at the Integrative Research Institute Law & Society.

Rabbi Jeremy Borovitz is the Director of Jewish Learning for Hillel Deutschland, which he founded together with his wife Rabbi Rebecca Blady. Jeremy grew up in New Jersey, spent several years in the Ukraine and has been living in Berlin since 2019. He has previously worked for the Peace Corps, the JDC, and Moishe House. He is also the founding president of the US Friends of Fraenkelufer association.