Tracking the Traffic is an interdisciplinary project that addresses the history of trafficking in women as part of the history of migration in the 19th and 20th century.

Until the interwar period, women from Eastern Europe—many of them from Jewish families—became victims of internationally organized gangs of human traffickers.

Born in Switzerland in 1977 and residing in Germany, conceptual artist Elianna Renner works at the intersections of biography, fiction and history.

In her work she questions historical narratives and their inherent areas of omission – always striving to uncover the power structures behind these “untold” or “incommunicable” histories.

Tamar Lewinsky, curator for contemparory history at the Jewish Museum Berlin,  is responsible for the scientific aspects of the interdisciplinary project.

In her research she is dealing, among other things, with Yiddish culture, literature and language and with the history of Jewish migration.

Rebekka Voß is a professor at Goethe University in Frankfurt, where she teaches Modern Jewish History, spanning the Early Modern and Modern eras. Together with Elianna Renner, she manages the Bertha Pappenheim project in Frankfurt.

Jewish cultural history in Germany ranks among her primary areas of research.

Aleksandra Jakubczak originally from Warsaw is a doctoral student at Columbia where she conducts her research project about trafficking in Jewish women and discourses surrounding it at the turn of the twentieth century. She is particularly interested in studying how growing women’s mobility provoked exaggerated fears in Jewish society that had been already experiencing a crisis entailed by urbanization, industrialization, secularization, and mass migration.