EP 83: Rethinking post-Soviet Jewish Immigration to Germany: Narratives, Networks and the Russian-Ukrainian War

International Conference “Jewish Immigration from Eastern Europe to
Israel and Germany in the Light of the War in Ukraine (1991-2025).
Narratives, Memory and Identity Formation” December 2025 in Munich.
The Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has triggered
one of the largest refugee crises in recent European history. Over
1.2 million Ukrainian citizens have received temporary protection
in Germany, while a significant number of refugees—Jewish or of
Jewish origin—have also sought refuge in Israel and received
citizenship under the Law of Return. The experiences of Ukrainian
Jews in the wake of the war offer an important lens through which
to examine broader patterns of Jewish migration from Eastern Europe
over the past four decades. This two-day interdisciplinary
conference, organized by the Leonid Nevzlin Research Center for
Russian and East European Jewry at the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem, the Leibnitz Center for Contemporary History Potsdam and
the Center for Israel Studies at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in
Munich, aims to juxtapose two pivotal periods of Jewish migration
to Israel and Germany—the post-Soviet 1990s and the post-2022
Ukrainian crisis. By bringing together scholars from the humanities
and social sciences, the conference seeks to enrich our
understanding of the shifting meanings of Jewish belonging,
displacement, and diaspora in the 21st century. Through historical,
sociological, and cultural analyses, we aim to build a comparative
framework for analyzing Jewish migration in the context of
political rupture, memory politics, and transnational identity
formation.