Dr. Johanna Lehr

Professional Background

Johanna Lehr received a PhD in political science from the Paris 1 Sorbonne University, a professional master’s degree in adult psychopathology from the Paris 7 University, and a bachelor’s degree in law from Strasbourg University. Dr. Lehr has held a postdoctoral fellowship through the Fondation du Judaïsme Français in Paris and at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. She has also worked at Yahad-In Unum, a French organization that raises consciousness about sites of mass executions of Jews and Roma by Nazi killing units in Eastern Europe during World War II.

Dr. Lehr’s research seeks to uncover Jews’ daily lives and deaths in Paris during the Nazi occupation. Her past work has examined the burial processes for Jews who died in the Drancy internment camp to understand the function of Jewish funeral businesses in Paris at that time. Recently, her research has been dedicated to documenting the judicial persecution of Jewish men in the capital.

Fellowship Research

Dr. Johanna Lehr was awarded a Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies Fellowship for her research project, “Gendered Persecution, Gendered Responses: Jewish Women facing Repression in Paris 1941–1944,” which investigates Jewish women’s “long story of persecution” in Paris. Dr. Lehr intends to emphasize the multiple levels of repression they experienced and to focus on their reactions to the persecution process to address the specific fate of Turkish women and their families in Paris.

This fellowship allows Dr. Lehr access to the Museum's collections of French female survivors’ interviews. She will predominantly focus on the Union Générale des Israélites de France archives and on the archives of the Turkish Consulate in France, both accessible in the Museum’s archive. Her research will help to gain insight into the Jewish women’s experiences of hopelessness and fear, police investigations, and imprisonment before being interned in camps during the Nazi occupation in France. She is interested in the dynamics between Jewish women, French Justice, and deportation.

Residency Period: April 1–July 31, 2023