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

Rachel grew up in Berlin with a mix of cultures and nationalities in her home. She is an artist and a thinker, who's work focuses on shifting perspectives of history. Her practice is interdisciplinary, curatorial and often involves elements of performance and installation. After spending 15 years in New York, Rachel returned to work in Berlin. She holds a BA in Visual Studies from Harvard University. Rachel is a LABA Berlin 2021 Fellow, and is responsible for coordinating efforts to establish an alumni network for our continuously expanding community.

CREATIVE DIRECTOR

Kazim is the founder of an artists management, publishing and creative direction studio called ENDLESSLOVESHOW. While managing ENDLESS, he also holds the role of Chief Creative & Brand Officer at RA / Resident Advisor, the foremost electronic music platform globally, and is a co-founder of 23:59, RA's brand partnerships studio. Kazim has also provided concepts and creative direction for a range of clients across art and fashion including Absolut, Adidas, Interscope Records, Business of Fashion, Browns Fashion, Carhartt WIP, Channel 4, DAZED, Fendi, GAIKA, Highsnobiety, and more. He has exhibited his moving image and mixed media art at prestigious museums, film festivals and art galleries. 

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.

ARTIST LIAISON

Shir was raised in Accra, Ghana, before moving to London to pursue her BSc in Business and Management at King’s College London. Now based in Berlin, is the founder of the arts publication Ashtrays Magazine and runs her own creative practice. Given her multicultural and multidisciplinary background, she is passionate about leveraging the intersectional ties between the arts and the economy to promote a more sustainable and equitable socio-economic environment. 

OPERATIONS DIRECTOR

Bryan is a New Yorker of German background, helping cofound LABA Berlin in 2021 . He studied Economics at NYU, and European History at Humboldt in Berlin and the University of Vienna. Bryan has been the Operations Director of the Jewish Center Fraenkelufer Synagogue Association since 2020. Parallel to his work with LABA, Bryan is the German team Director for Widen the Circle/The Obermayer Foundation, an American organization focusing on Jewish heritage preservation and memory projects in Germany with the aim of supporting social justice and combating bigotry.

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.