Leo Baeck Institute London

Staff from the Leo Baeck Institute London joined colleagues, friends and supporters in Berlin on 2 November 2026 for a gala dinner marking the 70th anniversary of Leo Baeck’s death. The evening brought together the Institutes in Jerusalem, London and New York | Berlin, alongside the Wissenschaftliche Arbeitsgemeinschaft des Leo Baeck Instituts (WAG) and the Friends and Supporters of the LBI.

LBI London congratulates Jonathan Skolnik on his appointment as co-editor of *AJS Perspectives*, the magazine of the Association for Jewish Studies. Skolnik’s work has long focused on German-Jewish studies, intellectual history and film studies, and his scholarship has also reached LBI London through his contribution to the *Leo Baeck Institute Year Book.

The Leo Baeck Institute London is pleased to announce the publication of Witnessing Positions: Jews, Memories, and Minorities in Contemporary Germany by Irit Dekel, the latest title in the LBI’s German Jewish Cultures series.

The book examines how public debates in Germany about Holocaust memory, antisemitism and migration often position minorities at the centre of discussion while leaving their own voices and perspectives at the margins.

LBI London congratulates Professor Philippe Sands KC on receiving the 2026 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. The award recognises his work as a lawyer, writer and advocate for international law and human rights.

Sands is widely known for East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity, which brings together family history, the Holocaust and the development of international criminal law. The book follows the lives and ideas of the lawyers Hersch Lauterpacht and Raphael Lemkin, whose work shaped the concepts of crimes against humanity and genocide.

A new interview with Professor Cathy Gelbin, member of the LBI London executive board, offers a personal account of Jewish life, identity and memory in the German Democratic Republic.

Professor Gelbin grew up in an international German-American Jewish family in East Berlin. In conversation with Ruth Preusse for the House of the Wannsee Conference (https://www.ghwk.de/en), she reflects on her childhood, her search for other Jewish people and the place of Jewish identity in East German society.

A new oral history published by the Leo Baeck Institute London records the experiences of a man who left Czechoslovakia as a young child in 1939 and grew up in wartime Britain.

Through written recollections, photographs and selected audio extracts, he reflects on his family’s flight from Nazi persecution, his arrival in Britain on his fourth birthday, and the challenges of beginning a new life in a country where he initially spoke no English.

Today, 13 October 2026, we remember Dr Arnold Paucker OBE, known to colleagues and friends by his birth name of Arno, on the tenth anniversary of his death. As director of LBI London from 1959 to 2001 and a long-serving editor of the Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, he helped shape the Institute and its contribution to the study of German-Jewish history.

We are pleased to announce that Dr Alexander Brown, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Leo Baeck Institute London, has published a new article in Memory Studies.

“Memory, ideology and power: Towards a materialist framework” was published online at the end of September. The article examines how collective memory is shaped by institutions, political power and ideological interests, and calls for a more historically grounded and politically engaged approach to memory studies.