We are delighted to welcome the award-winning photographer and writer Julian Voloj to the Jewish Heritage Europe team. He will work with JHE Coordinator Ruth Ellen Gruber in bolstering the site as the go-to clearing house for news and information on Jewish heritage issues in Europe.
Born in Münster, Germany, Julian has spent years in the Jewish institutional and philanthropic world, among other things serving as the Executive Director of the European Union of Jewish Students in 2000-2003 and working in the New York office of the Joint Distribution Committee from 2007-2014, where his focus was international programming and relations.
As a writer and photographer he has worked on a number of projects dealing with Jewish tangible and intangible heritage. One project, Spurensuche, explored Jewish built heritage in and around his hometown, Münster.
Julian’s new book, Ghetto Brother: Warrior to Peacemaker, is a graphic novel co-authored with Claudia Ahlering, which has won high praise from reviewers and was recently presented at the Jewish Museum in Berlin.
The book tells the true story of Benjy Melendez, son of Puerto-Rican immigrants, who founded, at the end of the 1960s, the notorious Ghetto Brothers gang and later led his multiracial gang as an advocate of peace. After initiating a gang truce, the Ghetto Brothers held weekly concerts that fostered the emergence of hip-hop. At the same time, Melendez began to reclaim his Jewish roots after learning about his family’s dramatic crypto-Jewish background.