Dr Bea Lewkowicz
Director Refugee Voices
Key talking points:
Oral history and social anthropology with a focus on trauma studies and migration studies
Dr Bea Lewkowicz is co-founder and Director of the AJR Refugee Voices Testimony Archive and Sephardi Voices UK, and Project Lead of the Holocaust Testimony UK Portal, a joint AJR/UK Government initiative which she has overseen since its inception.
She is a member of the Research Centre for German & Austrian Exile Studies at the University of London’s School of Advanced Study and has been awarded an OBE for her services to Holocaust Remembrance and Education in 2026.
An oral historian and social anthropologist, her research addresses displacement, trauma, identity and belonging through interviews with Holocaust survivors and refugees. She has directed many testimony-based films, and curated exhibitions, such as Double Exposure (Literaturhaus Wien, 2011) Sephardi Voices, Still in Our Hands: Kinder Portraits (Jewish Museum London, 2017 and 2019) and most recently the digital installation 80 Objects/80 Lives 80 Objects | Holocaust Testimony. Her films include Continental Britons, Moments and Memories, Seven Stories, Double Exposure, Voices For A Better World (narrated by Ed Skrein), Two Minutes Silence and, most recently Daisy and Louise (2025). Her main publications include The Jewish Community of Salonika (2006), This Is the Story of My Life (2020), and Émigré Voices (2022). Bea’s new book Postcard from Piestany, based on her mother’s memoir of wartime experiences in Slovakia, will be published in summer 2026.
"The interviews with my father and mother conducted by Bea Lewkowicz of the Association of Jewish Refugees were crucial to this book. I – and historians of all kinds – owe her a great debt of gratitude for the interviews that she has conducted with many survivors of oppression."
Lord Daniel Finkelstein OBE - Hitler, Stalin, Mum & Dad: A Family Memoir of Miraculous Survival
