Mazel tov to the historian, architect, and artist Natalia Romik, who has won a prestigious Dan David prize to further her work on researching and preserving the hiding places used by Jews during the Holocaust!
Natalia is one of nine scholars to receive the 2022 prize, which — after a refocusing of the award criteria this year — grants $300,000 each to “outstanding early and mid-career scholars and practitioners in the historical disciplines.” The Prize is endowed by the Dan David Foundation and headquartered at Tel Aviv University and is the largest history award in the world.
Natalia, 39, is is a public historian, architect and artist whose work focuses on Jewish memory and commemoration of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe, particularly Poland and Ukraine. She holds an MA in political studies from Warsaw University and a PhD at the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah in Paris.
She consulted on the POLIN museum in Warsaw and has curated exhibitions including the Jewish museum in the former synagogue in Chmielnik, Poland, and the permanent exhibitions at the Brodno Jewish cemetery in Warsaw and in the ceremonial hall at the Jewish cemetery in Gliwice.
Her other work has included the architectural project “Nomadic Shtetl Archive,” a piece of mobile architecture that travelled in southeastern Poland following the footprints of former Jewish towns, exploring the layers of urban memory.
With her current work on Holocaust hiding places, she has explored sewers, a dug-out in Warsaw’s Okopowa st Jewish cemetery, and even a hollow tree.
“Romik’s work combines archival investigation, theoretical research, architectural design, artistic practice, and social engagement,” the Dan David announcement states.
She has dedicated her efforts to investigating and preserving Jewish memory, especially its material and architectural traces, and the forgotten legacy of shtetls – small, historically Jewish towns.
She has designed exhibitions, staged performances and created nomadic installations in an effort to revive the spectral presence of Jewish communities while battling social amnesia and combating persistent antisemitism.
Watch a video of Natalia speaking on “Post-Jewish Architecture of Memory within Former Eastern European Shtetls” at the 2017 conference in Venice on Jewish Heritage Tourism in the Digital Age:
This year’s Dan David prize represents a refocusing of the award to recognize the work of young and mid-career “historians, art historians, archaeologists, digital humanists, curators, documentary filmmakers and all those who deepen our knowledge and understanding of the past.”
The new focus was spearheaded over the past year by Ariel David, son of the award’s founder, Dan David, who died in 2011. It had previously awarded three prizes of $1 million each year to honor the career or lifetime work of prominent individuals whose “achievements [had] an outstanding scientific, technological, cultural or social impact on our world.” Each year specific fields for the awards were chosen within three Time Dimensions – Past, Present and Future.
With the new direction, the prize will now focus on supporting ongoing and future work.
“We live in a world in which investment in the humanities, particularly in the historical disciplines, is declining, even though we know how important studying the past is for understanding the present and building the future,” said Ariel David told the Times of Israel. “For these reasons we have decided to focus our resources on this field and help catalyze the next generation of scholars.”
Previous winners included Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, a leading voice and activist in the promotion and study of Jewish cultural heritage, particularly in the fields of Yiddish and Eastern European Jewish life and history. In 2006, she was asked to lead the development of the core exhibition of POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, in Warsaw, and continues today as the Ronald S. Lauder Chief Curator.
Read the Dan David announcement of Natalia Romik’s award
Read the announcements of the awards in general
Read about the awards in the Washington Post