Hanna (Anna) Abakunova is a postdoctoral researcher at Yad Vashem (Israel). She completed her PhD at the University of Sheffield (UK) with the dissertation titled “The Rescue and Self-Help of Jews and Roma in Ukraine during the Holocaust”.
Dr. Abakunova is the co-author of the “Annotated Bibliography on the Genocide and Persecution of Roma and Sinti”, published by IHRA (2016) and the author of other publications on the extermination and rescue of Jews and Roma in Ukraine published in Ukraine, Russia, Poland, Romania, and the USA. From 2008 to 2017 she held positions as a research fellow at a number of institutions including the NIOD (Amsterdam), the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the New Europe College (Bucharest), Yahad-in Unum (Paris), and Yad Vashem (Jerusalem). In 2017 and 2018 she was an EHRI fellow and conducted her research at the Bundesarchiv in Berlin and Ludwigsburg. In 2019-2021 she held postdoctoral fellowships at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.
Abakunova’s research interests encompass the history and memory of the Holocaust and the persecution of Roma in Ukraine under German and Romanian occupation. These interests include the rescue and self-rescue of Jews and Roma in Ukraine from a comparative perspective, inter-ethnic relations in Transnistria and southern Ukraine, the Holocaust Historiography in the post-Soviet countries, and memory of the persecution of Roma and Jews.
Abakunova’s current project is titled “Helping Ukrainian Jews by International Jewish and Non-Jewish Organizations”. She will focus on the activity of international Jewish and non-Jewish organizations operating in the territories of occupied Soviet Ukraine with an emphasis on former Polish territories – contemporary western Ukrainian cities Lviv and Ternopil, as well as the Ivano-Frankivsk regions.