Team

  • Dekel Peretz

    PROGRAM DIRECTOR

    Dekel was born in Tel-Aviv, grew up in New York City and has been living in Berlin since 2002. As president 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 studying Jewish-Muslim encounters in Berlin.

  • Rachel Libeskind

    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.

  • Kazim Rashid

    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. 

  • Olaf Kühnemann

    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.

  • Bryan Fellbusch

    OPERATIONS DIRECTOR

    Bryan is a New Yorker of German background who has been in Berlin since 2009. He studied Economics at New York University, and European History at Humboldt University in Berlin and the University of Vienna. Bryan has worked in the historical tourism and event management sector in Berlin (and across Europe) for much of the last decade, and since late 2020 has been the Operations Director of the Jüdisches Zentrum Synagoge Fraenkelufer, overseeing a number of cultural and community focused programs. Additionally, Bryan is on the German management team of Widen the Circle/The Obermayer Foundation, an American organization recognizing historical preservation and memory work here in Germany with the aim of supporting social justice and combating hate.

  • Shir Shoval-Simhoni

    ARTST LIAISON

    Shir Shoval Simhoni 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, as well as running 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. 

  • Yael Attia

    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

    Tal 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 Free University. He is currently directing Jacob Jacobson, an apocalyptic tragicomedy written in Yiddish in 1930 by Aaron Zeitlin.

  • Jeremy Borovitz

    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.