Ronne & Donald Hess cordially invite you to a discussion with Edward Serotta on Monday, April 14th at 4:00pm.

Edward is a Savannah-born, Vienna-based writer, photographer, and filmmaker who has spent 40 years in Central and Eastern Europe. He has focused on Jewish themes while also covering wars and revolutions.

He is the founder of Centropa, a Jewish historical institute. Their archive is unique: Centropa worked with 140 interviewers, editors, and historians, where they interviewed 1,230 elderly Jews still living in 20 European countries. They never used video in those interviews. They did not focus primarily on the Holocaust. Rather, Centropa digitized 25,150 family photographs and transcribed 45,000 pages of stories that begin in the 1920s and end in 2007. In 2023, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum purchased the Centropa archive, which in late 2025 will open a special collections page on the USHMM website.

Centropa’s educational teams work in 11 countries in Europe, as well as in North America and Israel and conduct 15 to 17 teachers’ seminars every year. Centropa Summer Academies have brought 1,150 teachers from 15 countries to Europe, where they meet with historians and tour cities such as Berlin, Prague, Sarajevo, Budapest, and Vienna.

Edward Serotta has spent 30 weeks in Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion, where he has filed a dozen long-form articles for Tablet Magazine. He is currently at work on a book on Jewish writers and their cities in Ukraine while also working with schools throughout the country.