Ms. Joana Bürger

Professional Background

Joana Bürger is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Washington. Ms. Bürger holds a master’s degree in Middle Eastern history from Tel Aviv University and a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Potsdam.  She was the lead curator on the exhibition “A Turkish Jew in Nazi Germany” at the Holocaust Center for Humanity. She also served as a digital humanities curator and editor of “Embers of the Ottoman Empire,” an online folio produced by the Stroum Center of Jewish Studies at the University of Washington and Ayin Press.

Ms. Bürger has conducted research in archives across the United States, Greece, and Israel, including at the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People and the Central Zionist Archives. Her work draws on a wide range of sources, including letters, memoirs, and oral history interviews. She engages with materials in German, Greek, English, French, Ladino, Hebrew, and Turkish.  

Fellowship Research

While at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as a Leon and Edith Milman Memorial Fellow, Joana Bürger will conduct research on Jewish refugees who fled from Central and Eastern Europe to the Aegean World during the Nazi period. 

Her research focuses on the activities of local Jews in Greece and Turkey, who facilitated, channeled, and regulated the movement of Jewish refugees through their countries in the 1930s and 1940s. Ms. Bürger argues that Greek and Turkish Jews contributed to the emergence of the Aegean as a multidirectional transit space for Jewish refugees. They did this by exploiting the contradictory visa policies of their respective countries, which allowed them to redefine the concepts of Jewishness, citizenship, and being a refugee. This approach positions the Aegean as central to Holocaust geography. It situates Jewish flight within the broader context of population movements in the Eastern Mediterranean during the political transition from empire to nation-state.  

This fellowship will allow Ms. Bürger to utilize archival collections related to Jewish communities in Greece and Turkey, supporting her efforts to reconstruct the role of local Jews as agents of humanitarian aid. It also provides her access to the International Tracing Service digital archive, which will help her to map refugees’ escape routes from Europe through the Aegean region to the Middle East. 

Residency Period: June 1, 2026–July 31, 2026