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Dr Bea Lewkowicz

Project Lead, Holocaust Testimony UK

Dr Bea Lewkowicz is an orał historian, filmmaker, and photographer. Her work focusses on identity, displacement, trauma and loss, through the lens of her interviews with Holocaust survivors and Jewish refugees, who had to leave their homes and start a new life elsewhere.


Bea grew up in Germany,  the daughter of two Holocaust survivors. She is the co-founder and director of the Association for Jewish Refugees’ AJR Refugee Voices Testimony Archive and Sephardi Voices UK, two unique “people’s” oral history archives. Her extensive personal archive includes interviews with Salonikan Holocaust survivors and German Jewish refugees. Her oral history projects can be accessed internationally in leading museums and research institutions. They have formed the basis of exhibitions around the world including London’s Jewish Museum, Vienna’s Literaturhaus und Haus der Geschichte Österreich and the Bundestag in Berlin.


Her films include Continental Britons, Moments and Memories, Seven Stories, Double Exposure, Voices For A Better World (narrated by Ed Skrein), Two Minutes Silence and, most recently Daisy and Louise. They have been shown internationally and used in major Holocaust remembrance events. Still In Our Hands, Bea’s travelling photography exhibition of her portraits of Kindertransport refugees, debuted at the Jewish Museum, London, in 2019.


As part of her role as the director of the AJR Voices Testimony Archive, she headed the AJR’s International Testimony Forum in April 2023.


Books include: The Jewish Community of Salonika (2006), This Is The Story Of My Life (2020) and Emigre Voices (2022). Bea is an active Holocaust educator, with a focus on women’s stories of survival, the Kindertransport, the Jewish community of Thessaloniki, and the Holocaust in Slovakia, including her mother’s story of survival.


She is a member of the Research Centre for German & Austrian Exile Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London.

Susanna Kleeman

Head of Digital, Holocaust Testimony UK

Susanna Kleeman is a service strategist and site maker. She wrote the original business case for the BBC’s iPlayer service and worked there as part of the core team developing the BBC’s digital archive, as well as leading the development of the BBC’s first mobile service as the BBC's Head of Emerging Platforms. Other strategy work includes interactive TV projects for Cable & Wireless and Virgin Media. 


She has built sites for many clients, recently specialising in digital archives including AJR Refugee Voices, Sephardi Voices UK, and the Jewish Music Institute Archive


She runs the popular social media accounts for AJR Refugee Voices, one of the UK's most successful online Holocaust education projects, and has worked with the Board of Deputies and the Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe on Hidden Treasures, a project about the history of Jews in Britain.


She has a first-class degree in Modern History from Oxford University.

Digital Edge

Agency

Digital Edge are one of Britain's leading Wix-based agencies. Their award-winning sites and services are a testament to their commitment to teamwork and excellence, and their passion for what they do.


This people-centric approach has made them the natural partners for this project, requiring, as it has done, great sensitivity to the material and endless patience with huge amounts of different sorts of data.


Based in Aycliffe Business Park, built in 1940 during the Second World War as Royal Ordnance Factory 59, the team are surrounded daily with buildings once created as ammunition factories for the war effort. 


Learn more here: wearedigitaledge.co.uk.

The Team

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