Long-standing members of the JR editorial board, Dr Bea Lewkowicz and Michael Mail, have been awarded honours by the King
We are thrilled to have two long-standing editorial board members recognised on the King's New Year Honours List. Dr Bea Lewkowicz, an oral historian, anthropologist, filmmaker and photographer, has been with JR from the early days and was awarded an OBE for services to Holocaust education; while Michael Mail, a qualified lawyer and author with an extensive career in the charity sector, who's worked with JR for over a decade, received an MBE for services to heritage and charity.
The pair share the list with major household names, including actor Sir Idris Elba and England football captain Leah Williamson CBE, as well as other notable Jews, including the director of UCL’s Centre for Holocaust Education Professor Ruth-Anne Lenga OBE and Holocaust survivor and child psychotherapist Lydia Tischler MBE.
“I'm thrilled as you can imagine,” said Mail, who set up the Foundation for Jewish Heritage in 2015 to help preserve important Jewish architectural sites, monuments and places of cultural significance. “I hope the award will help the foundation in demonstrating state support for our work preserving important historic synagogues at risk, which represents important shared Jewish and British heritage.”
Mail is also a trustee of Garnethill Synagogue Preservation Trust, a member of the Advisory Board of the Institute for Polish Jewish Studies, has three published novels, and produced the touring photography exhibition, Scots Jews: Identity, Belonging and the Future.
Dr Lewkowicz has devoted her career to exploring questions of identity, displacement, trauma, loss and belonging. She co-founded the AJR Refugee Voices Archive and Sephardi Voices UK; is the project lead on Holocaust Testimony UK, a Government-backed initiative that aims to advance Holocaust education by bringing together and providing free access to thousands of testimonies recorded by various UK organisations; and is a member of the Research Centre for German & Austrian Exile Studies at the University of London.
“I feel very honoured to have received this meaningful award,” she said. “At a time when Holocaust denial and antisemitism is on the rise, and memory moves into history, I hope that the voices of the survivors will continue to shape Holocaust education, research and public engagement, now and in the future.”
By Danielle Goldstein
Read articles by Dr Bea Lewkowicz OBE and Michael Mail MBE in the JR archive (subscriptions start from £33/a).