Berkowitz Fellowship

General Information

The Berkowitz Fellowship was created thanks to a generous gift by Mr. Ivan Berkowitz. The Berkowitz Fellow is typically awarded to a more senior scholar. The area of research addresses issues from a broad spectrum of Jewish learning and civilization. The Fellowship will facilitate research and scholarship into areas that examine the historical, cultural and political forces that helped shape the intellectual atmosphere in which the integration of varying traditions of law into an operative jurisprudential system was affected.

The Fellow will become fully integrated with the intellectual community of the Law School, regularly attending events at NYU School of Law, including the faculty colloquia and other similar events. The Berkowitz Fellow will present their research in progress once in the Fall semester and once in the Spring at a Workshop, which will be open to the intellectual community of the Law School, the University as a whole and other interested individuals by invitation.

Current Berkowitz Fellow - AY 2026-2027

Dr. Weronika Romanik

Weronika Romanik holds a PhD in Hebrew Studies and Literature from the University of Warsaw. She also studied Sociology and Anthropology, Conflict Resolution, and Yiddish Language and Culture. Recipient of numerous research fellowships, among the others at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv University, and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. As a Postdoctoral Fellow she continued research at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Goettingen (2019-2021) and at the Faculty of Social Sciences at Angelicum in Rome (2024, cooperation since 2023). She lectured at the University of Warsaw, including the Open University of University of Warsaw, Collegium Bobolanum and at the University of Wrocław in Poland. Between 2009 and 2017, she conducted extensive multilingual fieldwork in Israel, carrying out interviews with Holocaust survivors from the Bialystok area and with members of the Jewish resistance movement. She is actively engaged in educational and research initiatives and is a strong advocate of the concept of social archives.

CONTACT:  wmr217@nyu.edu

Research Title

The Rule of Contrast. The Legacy of the Leader of the Resistance Movement in the Bialystok Ghetto

Research area(s)

Jewish Studies, Holocaust Studies, Hebrew and Yiddish Language and Culture, Memory Studies, Oral History, Social Archives

Research Synopsis

The Rule of Contrast. The Legacy of the Leader of the Resistance Movement in the Bialystok Ghetto is the research project devoted to the writings of Mordechai Tenenbaum-Tamaroff (1916–1943). Tenenbaum is called a leader of the second-largest Jewish armed revolt in the occupied territories of Poland—after the Warsaw Ghetto – which came to be known as the “Białystok Ghetto Uprising”. In addition, he initiated the creation of the underground archive of the Białystok Ghetto—a collection of documents that partially survived the war but have not yet been fully edited and published. The research aims at establishing the foundation for a future critical edition of Tenenbaum’s writings, especially his multilingual 1943 diary, one of the most important documents of the Bialystok Ghetto Underground Archive. Written mainly in Hebrew, with some parts in Yiddish, and Polish, the diary serves as a unique historical evidence of underground activities.
The goal of the project is to prepare the first scholarly edition in English of the 1943 correspondence between Mordechai Tenenbaum and Bronka Vinizka, a liaison for the resistance movement. These letters, written during a period when Vinizka was operating
outside the ghetto walls while Tenenbaum remained inside, express a budding romance and contain both personal reflections and coded messages from the underground. 
The title, The Rule of Contrast, derives from Tenenbaum’s own phrase describing the tension between his lyrical sensitivity and the brutal reality of ghetto life. This concept provides the interpretive framework for the project, highlighting the coexistence of emotional intimacy, strategic planning, and the conscious creation of a historical testimony.

Previous Berkowitz Fellows

• Yael Landman
• Joseph E. David
• Marjorie Lehman
• Hanan Mazeh
• Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg
• Shulamit Furstenberg-Levi
• Yosef Sharabi
• Yuval Blankovsky
• Yobu (Job) Jindo
• Eli Schonfeld
• Jonathan Yovel
• Shai Wozner
• Marc Hirshman
• Gabriella Blum
• Rabbi Saul J. Berman
• Joseph David
• Leora Batnitzky
• Shahar Lifshitz