Board of Directors

Board Leadership

  • Andrzej Rojek has been active in global finance since 1986. Recently retired as the Managing Director at Advent Capital Management, he was a founder of Lydian Asset Management, a global hedge fund established in 1999 that focused on convertible bonds and relative value credit investments. Mr. Rojek served as a Managing Director and partner at Bankers Trust and with the convertible’s groups at Merrill Lynch.

    An American citizen who was born in Poland in 1956, Mr. Rojek graduated with honors from the University of Warsaw in 1979 with a degree in economics. He earned his master’s degree in economics from Columbia University in 1985. He serves presently as a trustee of the Kosciuszko Foundation in New York, as a member of the Executive Committee at Packer Collegiate Institute in New York, and on the investment committee of Mount Holyoke College. He is involved in numerous charitable initiatives in Poland, including POLIN Museum of History of Polish Jews, and the United States, where he supports the Chair in Polish Studies at Columbia University.

    In 2012, Mr. Rojek was decorated by the President of the Republic of Poland, Bronisław Komorowski, with the Knight’s Cross of the Order for Merit of the Republic of Poland for his work with the Jan Karski U.S. Centennial Campaign.

  • Roman Rewald is a Polish lawyer and US-qualified attorney admitted to practice law in the United States (State of Michigan). He is a retired partner of the law firm of Weil, Gotshal & Manges, continuing as an international commercial lawyer and experienced mediator holding an International Commercial Mediation Training Certificate. He is the President of the Lewiatan Mediation Center at the Employers’ Confederation Lewiatan in Poland and a mediator listed at the ICC ADR Paris. He is also an arbitrator at the Polish Chamber of Commerce Arbitration Court and Arbitration Court of Lewiatan Confederation, as well as an arbitrator at the Alternative Dispute Resolution Center of the American Chamber of Commerce in Kosovo. Roman is past Chair of the Board of Directors of the American Chamber of Commerce in Poland, Chair of the Foundation Board of Ronald McDonald Foundation in Poland (Fundacja Ronalda McDonalda), and sits on boards of commercial entities. In 2014, Roman Rewald was decorated with the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Rebirth of Poland Polonia Restituta, for contributions to the country’s economic transformation.

  • Elizabeth Szancer is an art curator and the founder of ESKart LLC, an art advisory firm that provides curatorial and collections management services to private collectors, corporations, and museums. She began her career at the Whitney Museum and as an Assistant Curator of the Nelson A. Rockefeller Collection. She has served various professional organizations, most notably the Association of Professional Art Advisors, where she currently is the Vice President, and on the Professional Fine Arts Committee of Foundation for Art and Preservation in Embassies. In 2011, Elizabeth curated the 10th anniversary exhibition of the Neue Galerie New York, "The Ronald S. Lauder Collection: Selections from the 3rd Century BC to the 20th Century. Germany, Austria, and France," and is curating the Neue Galerie’s 20th-anniversary exhibition. She participates in public programs and publications relating to the practices of art collecting and curating. Dedicated to the preservation of cultural Jewish heritage in Poland, she serves on the boards of American Friends of the JCC Krakow, Foundation of Jewish Heritage Poland, and the New Cracow Friendship Society. She is an active member of the Committee for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Tarnow, co-chair of the Antisemitism Task Force of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York City, and a member of the International Advisory Committee of Holocaust Survivor Day.

Board Of Directors

  • Patron of American Friends

  • After two decades in executive marketing roles building successful companies, Hilda launched her own consulting practice in 1996. Recent work with nonprofits focused on board development, strategic planning, fundraising, and building alliances for The Vera Institute, Lord Cultural Resources, YIVO, The Gordon Parks Foundation, The Anti-Defamation League, and UJA-Federation of New York.

    Hilda’s media and technology career includes the introduction of the National Geographic Channel in the US and clients such as Viewer’s Choice, The Disney Channel and Viacom. She also co-established Foote Cone Belding Direct in NY and served as Director of New Business Development and Marketing at Viacom.

    Hilda has been a trustee for The Pearl Theatre, CECArtsLink and has served on executive committees for The Jewish Museum, the James Beard Foundation and The Arts and Business Council. She is a well-respected public speaker, facilitator, coach and writer.

    The daughter of Holocaust survivors, Hilda has been actively restoring the Jewish story in her ancestral city of Radom, Poland and has collaborated with the Forum for Dialogue in Warsaw.

  • Dr. Anita Friedman has a distinguished record of public service, as both a professional and volunteer leader. She is the President of the Board of the Koret Foundation. Her roles in the Jewish and general communities extend from the Bay Area to the national and international arenas. Professionally, Dr. Friedman heads Jewish Family and Children’s Services (JFCS) in the San Francisco Bay Area.

    Dr. Friedman is also an expert on Holocaust and genocide education. She is the editor of the English-language edition of Rywka’s Diary, which has also been published in Polish translation and in more than a dozen other languages. She is the publisher of the Holocaust memoir Against All Odds and the Executive Producer of a forthcoming film on Polish Jewish life, Love, Murder, and Miracles.

    As a policy consultant to the State of Israel Ministry of Social Affairs, she has advised on effective policy strategies for human service provision and immigrant absorption. She also serves as a trustee on the national boards of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, University of Southern California’s Shoah Foundation, and Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture. She has served on various local, state, national, and international commissions, including as Commissioner of the San Francisco Human Services Commission. She has received numerous awards for her public service leadership.

  • Shana Penn is the Executive Director of Taube Philanthropies and a scholar-in-residence at the Graduate Theological Union’s Center for Jewish Studies, in Berkeley. She earned her masters degree in European Studies at Jagiellonian University. Her award-winning book, Solidarity’s Secret: The Women Who Defeated Communism in Poland, was published in the United States in 2005 and in Polish translation in 2014.

    Shana was decorated with the Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Polish Republic in 2013 for her outstanding contribution to the development of Polish-Jewish dialogue, support of POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, advocacy on behalf of Poland's inclusion in the Visa Waiver Program, and scholarly work on the role of women in Poland’s Solidarity movement. President Komorowski, when commemorating women on the 23rd anniversary of the first democratic elections in Poland on June 4, 1989, said he was inspired by Shana’s ground-breaking research. Most recently, in 2021, Shana received the Medal of Gratitude from the European Solidarity Centre in Gdańsk for being the first to research and present the role of women in the Solidarity movement and in introducing democracy in Poland.

  • Irene Kronhill Pletka was born in Shanghai. Thanks to a Sugihara visa, her parents, Jakob and Lilka Kronzylberg, both Polish citizens, were able to flee Vilna in January 1941 and cross Russia to Japan and then Shanghai. The family moved to Melbourne, Australia in 1946. Educated in Melbourne, she later studied and lived in London and Boston, earning degrees in psychology and fine arts. She settled in Manhattan in the 1990s.

    She is committed to the vitality of secular Jewish culture and the Yiddish language. She founded and is Director of The Kronhill Pletka Foundation, which is dedicated to the memory of her parents. The foundation supports Jewish cultural, educational, and social justice projects around the world. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and Center for Jewish History and a supporter of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which helped her family and so many others during our darkest hours. She is a Distinguished Benefactor of POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, where the reconstruction of timber-frame roof, painted ceiling, and bimah of the Gwoździec wooden synagogue were made possible by her generosity and that of her foundation.

  • Jerzy Warman is a son of survivors of the Warsaw ghetto. His mother was a courier for the Jewish Fighting Organization (Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa ŻOB), and both of his parents fought with the ŻOB unit during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. Jerzy grew up in Warsaw, where he studied law and sociology. He left Poland in the wake of the antisemitic campaign in 1968 and completed his graduate studies at Yale University and Columbia University. During the 1980s, he served as President of The International Network of Children of Holocaust Survivors and was a member of the Committee in Support of Solidarity in New York, which later became the Institute for Democracy in Eastern Europe. He has served on the editorial board of Uncaptive Minds, a periodical published by IDEE, and is a labor policy analyst with the City of New York.

Executive Leadership

  • Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is Professor Emerita at New York University and Ronald S. Lauder Chief Curator of the Core Exhibition at POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, in Warsaw. Her books include Image before My Eyes: A Photographic History of Jewish Life in Poland, 1864–1939 (with Lucjan Dobroszycki); They Called Me Mayer July: Painted and Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland Before the Holocaust (with Mayer Kirshenblatt); and Anne Frank Unbound: Media, Imagination, Memory, (with Jeffrey Shandler).

    Professor Kirshenblatt-Gimblett was awarded the 2021 Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Folklore Society. She was also honored for lifetime achievement by the Foundation for Jewish Culture, received honorary doctorates from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, University of Haifa, and Indiana University, the 2015 Marshall Sklare Award for her contribution to the social scientific study of Jewry, and was decorated with the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and awarded the Dan David Prize. She serves on Advisory Boards for the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Council of American Jewish Museums, Jewish Museum Vienna, Jewish Museum Berlin, and the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow. She also advises on museum and exhibition projects in Lithuania, Belarus, Albania, Israel, New Zealand, and the United States.

Founders

  • An American businessman, Victor Markowicz is POLIN Museum’s first Distinguished Benefactor, co-founder of the North American Council of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, precursor to the American Friends of POLIN Museum, and member of the POLIN Museum Council since 2008. Victorwas born in 1944 near Lake Baikal ,where his parents were interned in Stalinist labor camps. After the war, he returned to Poland with his family and studied mathematics at the University of Warsaw and at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, in Haifa, after departing for Israel in 1964. He created the software for ELBIT-100, Israel’s first commercial computer. In 1970, he immigrated to the United States, where he designed the first American state lottery in New Jersey. Co-founder of GTECH Corporation, a company that designs lottery systems for most state lotteries in the United States and 40 other countries on five continents. He has also owned race horses and produced films. He currently lives in New York and Florida with his wife ,Monika, and is an active investor. A bridge champion, he has captured several medals at the world bridge championships as a member of the Polish Seniors team. He has been honored with the Ellis Island Medal of Honor, awarded to immigrants who have made an outstanding contribution to America, and with the Commander’s Cross of the Order of the Republic of Poland

Emeritus / Emerita Directors

  • Cantor Joseph Malovany was born in Tel Aviv in 1941. A tenor soloist, he served as a cantor in Tel Aviv, the Israeli army, and synagogues in Johannesburg, and London before becoming cantor of the Fifth Avenue Synagogue in New York in 1973. He is Distinguished Professor of Liturgical Music at Yeshiva University, where the Joseph Malovany Chair for Advanced Studies in Jewish Liturgical Music was established in 1997 at the Belz School of Jewish Music. He is Rector at the Institute of Traditional Liturgical Music, Leipzig, Honorary President of the Cantorial Council of America, former Chair of the American Society for Jewish Music, and founder and Dean of the American Joint Distribution Committee’s Moscow Academy of Jewish Music. Cantor Malovany has been named Honorary Chief Cantor of Vilnius, Lithuania, and Honorary Chief Cantor of Riga, Latvia. In January 2004, he was decorated with the Cross of Merit – Commander of the Legion of Honor by the President of the Republic of Poland for his musical contributions. He is the first cantor to receive this honor.

  • Stuart Schear has served in national and global leadership roles in communications, marketing and grantmaking for some of the most highly regarded foundations and non-profits, including American Jewish World Service, the Atlantic Philanthropies, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

    Early in his career, Schear worked as a reporter for the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour and in various capacities on documentary films, including the PBS series Heritage: Civilization and the Jews and the Struggles for Poland. For the latter, he researched A Different World: Poland’s Jews 1919-1943.

    Schear has long had a strong interest in the history and culture of the Jews of Poland and Eastern Europe. As an undergraduate, he studied Yiddish language and literature and Jewish history at Columbia University and the YIVO Institute. More recently, Schear served on the board of the YIVO Institute and has traveled to Poland several times to pursue his own research.

    Currently, Schear is writing Pastry and Politics, a family history tracing the Yiddish roots of his New York family with generations of bakers and progressive political activists.

    Schear earned a B.A. from Oberlin College and received an M.A. from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, which honored him in 2022 with its annual alumni award.

  • Rabbi Arthur Schneier was born in 1930 in Vienna and survived the Holocaust in Hungary. He is Senior Rabbi of New York’s Park East Synagogue since 1962 and founder and President of the Appeal of Conscience Foundation since 1965. Rabbi Schneier is internationally known for his leadership on behalf of religious freedom, human rights, and tolerance. He was awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal for “his service as an international envoy for four administrations” and “as a Holocaust survivor, devoting a lifetime to overcoming forces of hatred and intolerance.” He received the U.S. Department of State Special Recognition Award for “his ecumenical work in favor of mutual understanding, tolerance, and peace.”

    Rabbi Schneier is the recipient of eleven honorary doctorates from American and European universities. In recognition of his achievements, his alma mater, Yeshiva University, established the Rabbi Arthur Schneier Center for International Affairs in 2004. He is Vice President of the World Jewish Congress, Honorary Chair of the World Jewish Congress (America), and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, United Nations Development Corporation, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Committee on Conscience, Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, and the American Joint Distribution Committee. In 2015 , Pope Francis designated him a Knight of St. Sylvestor, the fifth-highest papal order.

Team