Isaak (John) Najmann was born in Breslau, then Germany, in 1924. The son of Blima and Chuno, he was the eldest of four children, and the product of, in his words, an “intensely Jewish and Zionist family.” In 1939, he was sent to England on the Kindertransport, as were his siblings. John Najmann had a fervent interest in the Holocaust. A cornerstone of his life was a determination to give meaning to the Holocaust through study, research and preservation of the memory of the victims. John Najmann passed away in 1998. In 2003, his wife and children established the John Najmann Chair of Holocaust Studies, whose purpose is to support the activities of the International Institute for Holocaust Research – Yad Vashem. The Head of the Institute and incumbent of the John Najmann Chair of Holocaust Studies is Prof. Dan Michman. Each year the Institute hosts an annual lecture in John Najmann’s memory.
Activities of the John Najmann Chair
The John Najmann Chair of Holocaust Studies provides gracious support to the International Institute for Holocaust Research – Yad Vashem so that the Head of the Institute may carry out his important and varied tasks such as the supervision of the numerous research projects on the Holocaust being conducted in the Institute and scholarly guidance offered to the Institute’s postdoctoral research fellows each semester. The Chair provides the means for the incumbent to present lectures on the Holocaust both in Israel and abroad, to plan international symposia, workshops, and conferences, and to participate in international commissions. All research and activities conducted by the Institute are carried out under the guidance of the Chair’s incumbent. Prof. Dan Michman is the current incumbent of the Chair and Head of the International Institute for Holocaust Research – Yad Vashem.
The 2023 John Najmann Chair of Holocaust Studies Annual Lecture, "Dealing with Jewish Property in German occupied Poland - Frameworks of Appropriation and Looting" was postponed to the war and will be delivered online on January 11, 2024 by guest speaker Markus Roth, Ph.D., a research associate at the Fritz Bauer Institute since 2020. Roth is also a current research fellow at Yad Vashem’s International Institute for Holocaust Research.
Markus Roth studied German language and literature, Polish language and literature, and modern and contemporary history. He earned his doctorate from the University of Jena in 2008 with a thesis on German district commissioners (Kreishauptleute) in occupied Poland and their careers after 1945. He then became a staff member of the interdisciplinary institution Arbeitsstelle Holocaustliteratur (Research Unit for Holocaust Literature) in Giessen. He was vice director at the latter from 2010 to 2020 and also managing director from 2016 to 2020. He has been a research associate at the Fritz Bauer Institute since 2020.
Recent Annual Lectures of the John Najmann Chair of Holocaust Studies
December 15, 2022
Speaker: Dr. Friso Hoenveld
Lecture: "No fear for the future!” The Broader Context of the Dutch CS-6 Resistance Group
November 11, 2021
Speaker: Dr. Santiago López Rodríguez
Lecture: In No Man’s Land: Spanish Jews during the Holocaust in Occupied France
November 12, 2020
Speaker: Prof. David E. Fishman
Lecture: The Book Smugglers of the Vilna Ghetto: Rescuing Jewish Cultural Treasures from the Nazis and Soviets
