Eva Derman
President
Eva Derman is a molecular biologist. She spent two decades as head of the laboratory in the Department of Developmental and Structural Biology at the Public Health Research Insitute in New York with an adjunct appointment in the Department of Cell Biology in the New York University Medical School. After immigrating to the United States as a refugee from Czechoslovakia in 1968, she received her Ph.D. in Biological Sciences at Columbia University. As a Helen Hay Whitney fellow, she spent the first part of her postdoctoral training at Oxford University and the second half at Rockefeller University.
Susan Viuker Lieberman
Secretary
Widow of former co-president of the Society Thomas Reiner, Susan has been teaching ESL to adults in New York City for over 35 years. She is also an active volunteer with HIAS and a devoted genealogist and a family historian.
Yuri Kalina
Treasurer
In his semi-retirement, Yuri Kalina continues to be active in the area of public finance. He is a member of the board of directors of the New York Solar Energy Society for which he also edits and publishes its Monthly Digest.
He was born in Bratislava where he completed his secondary education. He received Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Engineering from Brown University and an MBA in Finance from Columbia University Business School. He started his professional career in urban planning before changing to public finance.
Petr Brod
Czech journalist, formerly Chief of the BBC’s Prague Bureau and currently freelancing in Czech Republic. Presenter of Historical Magazine on CT24, he regularly chairs debates at the Jewish Museum’s Department of Education and Culture.
Lois Roman
A Trustee of the Memorial Scrolls Trust (MST) and serves as the US Representative based on the East Coast.
Lois began her involvement with MST several years ago following a long career on Wall Street as a money manager. She is a master's candidate in the Fish Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Yeshiva University, has an undergraduate degree from Brandeis University and an MBA from Columbia Business School.
Zuzana Justman
Czech-American documentary filmmaker and writer, born in Czechoslovakia in 1931. Director of Emmy-Award winning documentary film Voices of the Children about three people who were imprisoned as children in the Terezín concentration camp.
Pavla Niklová
Executive Director, Václav Havel Library Foundation, formerly Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs appointed Cultural Attache in New York and Head of Public Relations and Development at the Jewish Museum in Prague.
Rebekah A. Klein-Pejšová
Jewish Studies Assistant Professor of History at Purdue University on Modern Jewish and Central European history, e.g. the problem of loyalty in state/society relations in the region of today's Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic.
Dr Jacob Labendz
Clayman Assistant Professor of Judaic and Holocaust Studies and the director of the Center for Judaic and Holocaust Studies at Youngstown State University.
Kateřina Čapková
Senior Researcher at the Academy of Sciences, Institute of Contemporary History, in the Czech Republic. Author of “CZECHS, GERMANS, JEWS? National Identity and the Jews of Bohemia.” published in Czech and English in 2012.
Joshua Teplitsky is an associate professor and the Joseph Meyerhoff Chair in Modern Jewish History at the University of Pennsylvania. He has held fellowships at the University of Oxford, the National Library of Israel, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard University. His book, Prince of the Press: How One Collector Built History's Most Enduring and Remarkable Jewish Library was published by Yale University Press in 2019 and was named the winner of the Salo Baron Prize of the AAJR for best first book in Jewish Studies in 2019, the 2020 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award of the Association for Jewish Studies, and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. He is currently at work on a book reconstructing a plague epidemic in eighteenth-century Prague and its impact on Jewish social and cultural life in the city.
Prof. Michael Lawrence Miller
Associate professor, Nationalism Studies program at Central European University in Vienna. Author of The Jews of Moravia in the Age of Emancipation (2011).
Vera Kalina-Levine
Born and raised in Bratislava, Vera holds a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Yale University. Her translation of Arnost Lustig’s From the Diary of Perla S. (Arbor House) won the 1986 National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. In 2019 she retired after 30 years as Vice President at Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group.
Pavla Rosenstein
Pavla spent her early childhood in Prague, before studying in the UK. She holds a BA in History from Cambridge University, and an MA in Technology as a Cultural Form from Goldsmiths College, University of London. For the past ten years she has worked in journalism, media production and public relations.
Honorary Board Members
Hon. Martin Dvořák
Former Consul General of the Czech Republic in New York
Amira Kohn-Trattner, Past President
Rabbi Norman Patz, Past President
Hon. Eliška Žigová,
Former Consul General of the Czech Republic in New York
Advisory Board
Andrea Bourgeois
Jan Laniček
Senior Lecturer, University of New South Wales (UNSW), Australia