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Ms. Sarah Garibova

Sosland Fellow
“Memories for a Blessing: Jewish Mourning Practices, Commemorative Activities, and Attitudes toward Death in Postwar Belarus and Ukraine, 1945-1991”

Professional Background

Ms. Sarah Garibova is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She possess language skills in English, Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish, Ukrainian, and Belarusian. While in residence at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, Ms. Garibova will work on her project “Memories for a Blessing: Jewish Mourning Practices, Commemorative Activities, and Attitudes toward Death in Postwar Belarus and Ukraine, 1945-1991”.

Ms. Garibova has presented her work at a number of conferences, including her paper “Calendars of Commemoration: Jewish Holidays, Collective Mourning, and the Power of Local Minhag in Postwar Ukraine and Belarus” at the Annual Conference of the Association for Jewish Studies (December 2015) and “A Will and a Way: Explaining the Persistence of Traditional Motifs on the Gravestones of the Jewish Cemetery of Rechitsa, Belarus after the Second World War” at the Annual Conference of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (November 2014). She has also presented her work at several symposia, including the International Forum of Young Scholars on East European Jewry at Boston University and the Graduate Student Workshop in Modern Jewish History at the Center for Jewish History. In 2015, she was awarded a research grant from the Brandeis-Genesis Institute for Russian Jewry, and she received the Weinberg Dissertation Prize from the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies.

Fellowship Research

For her Sosland Fellowship at the Mandel Center, Ms. Garibova analyzed Soviet Jews’ commemorative responses to the Holocaust in light of the challenges presented by rapid demographic decline and increasing secularization, whether imposed and voluntary. She further focused on Soviet Jewish commemorations of the Holocaust by studying individual and communal mourning through domestic rituals, monuments, and public ceremonies.

Ms. Sarah Garibova was in residence at the Mandel Center until August 31, 2016.