Centropa's headquarter is located in Vienna, Austria. Additional offices are in Budapest, Hungary, and Washington, DC., USA.
Edward Serotta is a journalist, photographer and filmmaker specializing in Jewish life in Central and Eastern Europe. Born in Savannah, Georgia, Edward has worked in Central Europe since 1985. Between 1996 and 1999, he produced three films for ABC News Nightline. Edward has published three books - Out of the Shadows, Survival in Sarajevo and Jews, Germany, Memory. He has contributed to Time Magazine, The L.A.Times, The Washington Post, and other outlets. Ed founded Centropa in 2000.
Ouriel Morgensztern is our tech director, was born in France, served in the Israeli Army for three years and is a member of Vienna's Jewish community basketball team. He holds a degree in Sound and Multimedia from ISTS in Paris. Ouriel keeps our multi-language, continually expanding databases in check, and is in charge of our website.
Fabian Rühle develops programs and runs seminars for schools all over Europe and Israel, and writes grant proposals for Centropa. Fabian emigrated from East Berlin to West Berlin in 1988. He has an M.A. in American History from Rutgers and the Free University of Berlin. Before joining Centropa in Vienna, Fabian worked for the American Jewish Committee in Berlin.
Wolfi hails from a small wine village in the Wienerwald, where he plays bass in a rock band we cannot bear to listen to. Wolfi studied filmmaking and is our chief filmmaker, sound engineer and sometimes graphic designer.
Birgit Haberpeuntner is originally from a small town near Salzburg and received her Master's degree in English from the University of Vienna. Besides doing translations and editing work, Birgit also manages our Border Jumping community, and she is in charge of logistics for our annual Summer Academy program, which brings 65 teachers from 15 countries for 9 days to Europe.
Dr. Lauren Granite directs our US educational programs. Before joining the Centropa staff, she spent more than a dozen years teaching Jewish history in colleges, Jewish day schools and congregational schools. As a teacher, Lauren created our first cross-cultural projects with Berlin and Budapest. And since 2010 she has been building our network of Jewish day and congregational schools; expanding into public, parochial and charter schools; running workshops and seminars; mentoring teachers; writing lessons and projects; and establishing teacher advisory teams to advise us about Centropa curricula.
Marcel Kenesei learned he was Jewish when his parents brought him, age 14, to the Lauder Foundation school in Budapest. Since then he's been a camper and counselor at Jewish camp, and received a master's degree from Paideia, the prestigious Jewish studies institute in Stockholm. Marcell oversees our Hungarian public school program and is in charge of our network of European Jewish schools.
Roman hails from St. Petersburg, Russia, and attended the Lauder Business College in Vienna before joining Centropa. He assists our chief filmmaker, Wolfgang Els.
Tanja, our chief interviewer, was born in East Germany, moved to West Germany in the 1980s and relocated to Vienna when she married. Tanja joined Centropa as an interviewer in 2002 , and since then she has conducted more than 70 interviews in Austria and another 3 in Israel. In 2006, she started our Vienna Cafe Centropa social club, which brings together our elderly interviewees once a month to enjoy a lecture, social program or a festive Jewish holiday meal.
Veronika Doppelreiter has been Centropa's stalwart bookkeeper since 2004 and we can barely get by a day without her. Veronika was born in Brazil and worked as a freelance bookkeeper for El Al Airlines and other companies before coming to work with us.
Esther hails from ..., Romania, where she attended a German high school. She then studied ... at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, where she graduated in 2012. She is currrently creating a Romanian reader based on the Centropa interviews.
Marie was born in Munich, grew up in Vienna, where she studied at the prestigious Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst.
She is in charge of designing our brochures, reports, books, and exhibitions.
Szilvia is helping our Hungarian director Marcell Kenesei with the organization of the Budapest Cafe Centropa, which meets six times a year and brings together our interviewees from Budapest.