Professional Background
Uriel Gellman is a professor in the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at Bar-Ilan University, where he is the Marcel and Maria Roth Chair in the History and Culture of Polish Jewry. Dr. Gellman holds a PhD, master’s, and bachelor’s degrees in Jewish studies from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He specializes in the history of Eastern European Jewry in the early modern and modern periods, with a particular focus on the history of Hasidism, Jewish Orthodoxy, and the social and cultural processes of modernization. His research integrates social, intellectual, and cultural history, and he has published widely in the field, including several books and numerous scholarly articles on Jewish life in Eastern Europe.
Fellowship Research
While at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, as a Phyllis Greenberg and Richard D. Heideman Fellow, Uriel Gellman will pursue a project on the fate of Orthodox Jewish communities in Poland before and during the Holocaust, focusing on the Radomsk Hasidic movement and its educational network. Drawing on archival sources, testimonies, and contemporaneous documentation, his study examines how Orthodox leadership and institutions functioned in the interwar period and were ultimately destroyed under Nazi persecution. The project engages recent Holocaust scholarship that highlights the diversity of Jewish society and pays greater attention to distinct cultural and religious groups, particularly in relation to questions of faith and communal resilience under extreme conditions.
Residency Period: January 1, 2027 - April 30, 2027