Hanna (Anna) Abakunova currently is a postdoctoral researcher at Yad Vashem (Israel). She completed her PhD at the University of Sheffield (UK) with the dissertation entitled “The Rescue and Self-Help of Jews and Roma in Ukraine during the Holocaust”.

Dr. Abakunova is the co-author of the “Annotated Bibliography on the Genocide and Persecution of Roma and Sinti” published by IHRA (2016) and the author of other publications on the extermination and rescue of Jews and Roma in Ukraine published in Ukraine, Russia, Poland, Romania, and the USA. In 2008-2017 she held Visiting Research Fellow positions at a number of institutions including the NIOD (Amsterdam), the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the New Europe College (Bucharest), Yahad-in Unum (Paris), and Yad Vashem (Jerusalem).

In 2017-2018 she was an EHRI fellow and conducted her research at the Bundesarchiv in Berlin and Ludwigsburg. In 2019-2021 she held a postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

Abakunova’s research interests encompass the history and memory of the Holocaust and persecution of Roma in Ukraine under the German and Romanian occupation. These interests include the rescue and self-rescue of Jews and Roma in Ukraine in a comparative perspective, inter-ethnic relations in Transnistria and southern Ukraine, the Holocaust Historiography in the post-Soviet countries, and memory about the persecution of Roma and Jews.

Abakunova’s current project is entitled “Helping Ukrainian Jews by International Jewish and Non-Jewish Organizations”. She will look at the activity of international Jewish and non-Jewish organizations operated on the territories of occupied Soviet Ukraine with an emphasis on former Polish territories – contemporary western Ukrainian Lviv, Ternopil, and Ivano-Frankivsk regions. For this purpose she will visit The Center for Holocaust Studies at the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History in Munich and the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw.