Andrzej Folwarczny

President & CEO

Founder and President of Forum for Dialogue. He began as first local and then national-level politician during the transformation. He served as a Member of the Polish National Parliament (Sejm), where he chaired the Polish-Israeli Parliamentary Group. After retiring from politics, he devoted himself to Polish/Jewish dialogue and relations.

Zuzanna Radzik

Vice President

Theologian, graduate of the Pontifical Faculty of Theology in Warsaw and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She is a regular contributor to Tygodnik Powszechny, a Catholic weekly, and an author of books on women’s presence in the Church. In 2019, she received the Irena Sendler Memorial Award for her work on Polish/Jewish dialogue and the role of women in Catholicism.

Jakub Petelewicz

Executive Board Member

Historian, co-founder and academic secretary of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research at the Polish Academy of Sciences where he also serves as a Managing Editor of Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały and Holocaust Studies and Materials academic journals. One of the authors of the initial project of the Holocaust Gallery at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews.

Olga Kaczmarek

Director General

Holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from the University of Warsaw, where she used to teach. She published a book on Emmanuel Levinas and postmodern anthropology. She also researched the memory of wartime Polish/Jewish relations. She started as a School of Dialogue educator in 2012. Currently, she is responsible for Forum’s operations and represents the foundation in Poland and abroad.

Monika Halaczek

Deputy Director General

Graduate of International Relations with experience in coordinating human rights-focused projects and fundraising. She has been with the Forum since 2010, and has been responsible for the structure and running of the organization. She overviews formal and legal aspects of Forum’s work.

Agnieszka Gilska-Janus

Financial Manager

An economist with years of experience on the executive boards at organizations of various sizes. For the last few years, she has been involved with NGOs. At the Forum since 2022, she is responsible for the foundation’s finances, including, among others, budgeting, financial reporting, and grants performance reporting.

Hanna Gospodarczyk

Program Team Manager

An anthropologist and arabist, she has experience in coordinating cultural and historical projects, and has participated in research on the memory of Jewish communities in Malopolska. At the Forum since 2019. She currently directs the work of the program team and supports the foundation’s grant and scholarship program for the members of the Leaders of Dialogue network.

Kinga Pańczyszyn-Liśkiewicz

Fundraising and Donor Relations Manager

A sociologist with nearly a decade of experience in non-governmental organizations. She managed a corporate foundation and was a member of the board of the Polish Donors Forum. Experienced in creating and implementing fundraising strategies as well as coordinating ongoing fundraising activities. She writes about fundraising for Blog Sektor 3.0. At the Forum since 2022, she is responsible for fundraising and relations with donors.

Anna Barańska

Senior Bookkeeper

Involved with non-governmental organizations for over a decade, she has been with the Forum since 2014. She is responsible for reviewing financial and accounting services, as well as for financial administration of projects co-financed with public funding and international grants.

Maria Sokołowska

Office Coordinator

Graduated from Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Warsaw. She has researched the anthropology of religion in Ukraine and worked with the Zaczyn Foundation designing activities for the elderly citizens. Since 2017, she has been managing Forum’s office and supporting conducting of Forum programs and projects.

Bartosz Duszyński

Project Coordinator

Graduate of the Jewish Studies and Middle Eastern Studies at The Jagiellonian University, Ph.D. candidate at the Faculty of History at The Jagiellonian University. He worked at the Galicia Jewish Museum in Krakow. He specializes in Holocaust research and contemporary Israel studies. He organizes meetings between Polish and Israeli youth. Since 2022, he develops Forum’s Leaders of Dialogue program.

Julia Machnowska

Project Coordinator

Graduate of journalism and history, she is involved with the Polish Radio and oral history projects of Yahad-in Unum. Having coordinated Forum’s School of Dialogue in the past, she is now responsible for working with the School of Dialogue teachers and schools which continue their involvement after completing the initial program.

Izabela Meyza

Project Coordinator

Graduated Cultural Studies at the University of Warsaw, she is an educator, writer, and nonviolent communication expert and consultant. For over a decade, she has been working as an educator of children, teenagers, and teachers. She works with many organizations involved in non-formal education. She supervises and supports Forum’s School of Dialogue educators.

Jagoda Szkarłat

Project Coordinator

Graduate of Cultural Anthropology and Hebrew Studies at the University of Warsaw. She worked with minorities, migrant-support and Jewish NGOs in the fields of informal education, project coordination, and group facilitation. A School of Dialogue educator for seven years, since 2017 she has been developing Forum’s Leaders of Dialogue program for local activists.

Marcin Dziurdzik

Promotions Coordinator

Graduate of history at the University of Warsaw and alumnus of the Paradigm program at Paideia – The European Institute for Jewish Studies in Stockholm. He worked at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews and the Museum of Warsaw. Member of the board of the S. An-sky Association. Since 2017, he has been overseeing Forum’s digital public relations and marketing.

Iga Kondraciuk

Communications Coordinator and Office Assistant

Graduated from Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Warsaw, where she researched the memory of women’s experience during the war and post-war period in the Podkarpacie region. At the Forum since 2021, she coordinates communications in Polish, supports the office work, and coordinates activities of the Scholarly Advisory Board.

Marta Usiekniewicz

Communications Coordinator

With a Ph.D. in literature and gender studies, she is an Assistant Professor at the University of Warsaw’s American Studies Center. She was a Fulbright fellow at SUNY Buffalo and an intern at AJC headquarters in New York. At Forum since 2007, she coordinates international communications and multimedia production.

Anna Stefaniak

School of Dialogue Program Evaluator

Holds a Ph.D. in social psychology and specializes in the study of intergroup relations, psychological bases of prejudice, and prejudice reduction. Since graduating from the University of Warsaw in 2017 she has completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Loyola University Chicago and is currently a post-doctoral fellow at Carleton University in Ottawa and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Since 2012 Anna has been coordinating the evaluation of the School of Dialogue program.

Michał Bilewicz

Chair of the Scholarly Advisory Board

Social psychologist and professor at the Department of Psychology of the University of Warsaw, where he chairs the Center for Research on Prejudice. His research focuses on issues of prejudice, group conflicts, antisemitism, and dehumanization. In 2005-2019 he served as the Vice-President of Forum for Dialogue.

Barbara Engelking

Member of the Scholarly Advisory Board

A psychologist by training, Professor Barbara Engelking is the head of The Polish Center for Holocaust Research at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. For over 30 years she has been researching the Holocaust and its consequences. She is the author or co-author of many books and articles on the Holocaust in Poland.

Agnieszka Haska

Member of the Scholarly Advisory Board

A sociologist and cultural anthropologist, Agnieszka Haska, PhD, is an assistant professor at the Polish Center for Holocaust Research at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Her research interests cover a wide range of topics – from the discourse on collaboration during World War II, through stories of attempts to save Jews thanks to passports from other countries, to an anthropological perspective on various forms of memory and post-memory. Author of, among others: I am a Jew, I want to enter. Hotel Polski in Warsaw 1943 (2006, in Polish) and Hańba! Stories about Polish betrayal (2018, in Polish).

Mikołaj Herbst

Member of the Scholarly Advisory Board

Assistant professor at the Centre for European Regional and Local Studies (EUROREG), University of Warsaw, doctor habilitatus in economy. Specializing in regional development, human capital, and education economics. Graduate of the Faculty of Economic Sciences at the University of Warsaw and the Columbia Cooperative Program in Economics by the University of Warsaw and Columbia University in New York. Engaged in several research projects on the determinants of regional growth, the measurement of educational quality, and the financing of education systems. Advisor to the public administration on issues of management of education systems in Poland and abroad, consultant in projects organized by the OECD, the International Labor Organization, and the World Bank.

Kamil Kijek

Member of the Scholarly Advisory Board

Historian and sociologist, Kamil Kijek, PhD, works at the Department of Jewish Studies, University of Wroclaw. He studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv University, University of Haifa, and at University College London. Fellow at the Center for Jewish History in New York, the New York University, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. His research interests are Jewish history in Eastern-Central Europe in the second half of 19th and 20th centuries, relations between social theory, political, social and cultural history, as well as the history of Zionism and the Jewish community of Eretz Israel/Palestine in the 19th and 20th centuries. In 2001-2007, he worked as an educator on behalf of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee at Jewish youth camps in Poland and Hungary. In 2007-2012, he was involved in planning the permanent exhibition of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. Author of, among others, Children of Modernism. Political consciousness and socialization of the Jewish youth in interwar Poland (2017, in Polish).

Justyna Kowalska-Leder

Member of the Scholarly Advisory Board

Assistant professor and a doctor habilitatus in cultural studies at the Institute of Polish Culture, University of Warsaw, where she is the head of the Holocaust Remembrance Research Team. Author of Their Childhood and the Holocaust: A Child’s Perspective in Polish Documentary and Autobiographical Literature (2015), “I don’t know how to value them …” A Sphere of Ambivalence in the Testimonies of Poles and Jews (2019, in Polish), as well as editor of Renia Knoll’s Diary (2012, in Polish); co-editor and co-author of Traces of the Holocaust in the Imagery of Polish Culture (2017, in Polish).

Stanisław Krajewski

Member of the Scholarly Advisory Board

Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Warsaw, Stanisław Krajewski obtained a PhD in mathematics, habilitation in philosophy, and the title of professor in humanities. An active participant of the Jewish life revival in Poland even before 1989, later involved in the Jewish community life. Co-founder of the Polish Council of Christians and Jews, which he has been co-chairing for almost 30 years. He co-created the Postwar Years gallery at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. Author of books and articles on logic, philosophy of mathematics, Judaism, history and experiences of Jews, interreligious dialogue. His books include: Jews, Judaism, Poland (1997, in Polish), 54 Commentaries on the Torah for Even the Least Religious Among Us (2004, in Polish), Poland and the Jews. Reflections of a Polish Polish Jew (2005), The Mystery of Israel and the Mystery of the Church (2007, in Polish), Our Jewishness (2010, in Polish), What I owe to Interreligious Dialogue and Christianity (2017), Jews in Poland – and in Tatra Mountains (2019, in Polish), as well as Goedel’s Theorem and Its Philosophical Interpretations: from Mechanism to Post-Modernism (2003, in Polish) and Does Mathematics Belong in the Humanities? (2011, in Polish).

Łukasz Krzyżanowski

Member of the Scholarly Advisory Board

Assistant Professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Łukasz Krzyżanowski received a PhD in Social Sciences from the University of Warsaw. From 2016 to 2018, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin. He was also an Assistant Professor at the Institute of History, University of Warsaw. His monograph, Dom, którego nie było: Powroty ocalałych do powojennego miasta had two editions in Polish: in 2016 and 2018. Its English-language adaptation, Ghost Citizens: Jewish Return to a Postwar City was published in June 2020 by Harvard University Press. He has held scholarships from the University of Oxford, Yad Vashem, the Claims Conference (Kagan Fellowship), and the National Science Center. His research interest focuses on the experience of Jewish Holocaust survivors in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the social history of Poland during the German occupation, and the Holocaust.

Roma Sendyka

Member of the Scholarly Advisory Board

Roma Sendyka is a professor at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. She works at the Department of Anthropology of Literature and Cultural Studies, Faculty of Polish Studies. She is a co-founder and director of The Research Center for Memory Cultures, and a member of the Curatorial Collective. She specializes in cultural and literature theory, visual culture studies, and memory studies. She is an author of The Modern Essay: Studies in Historical Awareness of a Genre (2006, in Polish), From “I” Culture to the Culture of the “Self” (2015, in Polish), and co-editor of four volumes on memory studies. She is the leader of a research project Uncommemorated Genocide Sites and their Impact on Collective Memory, Cultural Identity, Ethical Attitudes, and Intercultural Relations in Contemporary Poland (2016–19), as well as the Awkward Objects of Genocide, a project funded through Transmitting Contentious Cultural Heritages with the Arts: From Intervention to Co-Production (2016–2019) grant. Co-curator of the exhibition Terribly Close. Polish Vernacular Artists Face the Holocaust (2018-2019). Her current work focuses on so-called “non-sites of memory” and visual approaches to genocide representation.

Dariusz Stola

Member of the Scholarly Advisory Board

Professor Dariusz Stola is a historian with a title of doctor habilitatus, working at the Institute for Political Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences. He has published ten books and more than 150 articles on the history of Polish-Jewish relations, the communist regime in Poland, and international migrations in the 20th century, including: Hope and the Holocaust (1995, in Polish); The Anti-Zionist Campaign in Poland , 1967-1968 (2000, in Polish); A Country with No Exit? Migrations from Poland, 1949-1989 (2010, in Polish); Patterns of Migration in Central Europe (2001, with C. Wallace). His books have received several awards, while he was awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta for his contribution to research on Poland’s history and the Medal of the University of Warsaw for his contribution to migration studies. He serves at the Polish Academy of Sciences’ Committee on History and Committee on Migration Research, as well as at advisory boards of several Polish and international institutions and journals. Besides the research, he has worked as the director of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews (2014-2019) and vice-president of Collegium Civitas (2002-2011).