Professor Eugene Weiner Grant

  Rabbi and Professor Eugene Weiner was a brilliant person with a bright destiny. Born in America into a family of Eastern Europe emigrants (from Ukraine and Vilna), he grew up in New York and Miami Beach, graduated from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTSA) and Columbia University. In 1969 along with his family, his wife Anita and two young sons Daniel and David, Eugene Weiner made aliya, served for 18 years in the Israel Defense Forces where he got the rank of captain. He was a professor of sociology at the University of Haifa, where the students for several years awarded him the title of the best teacher, published scholarly works, including several co-authored by his wife Anita.  Eugene did a lot for the development of Jewish studies in the former Soviet Union, where he worked for several years (1996-1999) as head of special projects of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) in Moscow. He has provided many-sided support to academic programs in Jewish Studies, was a member of the International Council of Sefer Center.
All those years Anita Weiner lived and worked in Moscow side by side with her husband (she wrote the book, “Regeneration: the reunification of Soviet Jewry with Jewish people. The Decennary of American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in the former Soviet Union. 1988-1998”.
After the untimely death of Professor Wiener his colleagues in cooperation with Sefer Center issued a collected volume dedicated to his memory, made up of his own works, recollections about him and articles of researchers from Israel, USA, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus.
His widow Dr. Anita Wiener established a Grant named after her late husband, called to continue his endeavors, to promote research, scientific and teaching activities in the field of Jewish Studies in the CIS and the Baltic states.
  This grant is awarded each year at “Sefer” international conferences, the recent years recipients were:
2005 - Alexander Vladimirov (Moscow), Tatiana Percent (Kiev). 
2006 - Alexander Lokshin (Moscow), Ilya Barkussky (Moscow). 
2007 - Rashid Kaplanov (Moscow), Catherine Cybulski (Kiev). 
2008 - Michael Vogman (Moscow), Olesya Shaidukov (St. Petersburg).  
2009 - Alexander Besarov (Chernivtsi), Tamara Zhuk (Kiev), Yuri Korogodsky (Kiev), Vladimir Lyubchenko (Kiev), Olga Minkina (St. Petersburg), Igor Muratov (Minsk), Igor Turov (Kiev), Ilya Yablokov (Tomsk ). 
2010 - Lilia Kalmina (Ulan-Ude), Svetlana Koloda (Gorlovka) Alexandra Polyan (Moscow).
2011 - Elena Nosenko-Stein (Moscow), Maxim Gammal (Moscow).