EP 86: Memories in a Bag: Ukrainian War Refugees and the Objects They Carried in Forced Migration to Israel

International Conference “Jewish Immigration from Eastern Europe to Israel and Germany in the Light of the War in Ukraine (1991-2025). Narratives, Memory and Identity Formation” December 2025 in Munich. The Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has triggered one of the largest refugee crises in recent European history. Over 1.2 million Ukrainian citizens have received temporary protection in Germany, while a significant number of refugees—Jewish or of Jewish origin—have also sought refuge in Israel and received citizenship under the Law of Return. The experiences of Ukrainian Jews in the wake of the war offer an important lens through which to examine broader patterns of Jewish migration from Eastern Europe over the past four decades. This two-day interdisciplinary conference, organized by the Leonid Nevzlin Research Center for Russian and East European Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Leibnitz Center for Contemporary History Potsdam and the Center for Israel Studies at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, aims to juxtapose two pivotal periods of Jewish migration to Israel and Germany—the post-Soviet 1990s and the post-2022 Ukrainian crisis. By bringing together scholars from the humanities and social sciences, the conference seeks to enrich our understanding of the shifting meanings of Jewish belonging, displacement, and diaspora in the 21st century. Through historical, sociological, and cultural analyses, we aim to build a comparative framework for analyzing Jewish migration in the context of political rupture, memory politics, and transnational identity formation.