Administrative Board
The Administrative Board consists of six members who represent the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Federation of Jewish Communities in the Czech Republic, the Terezin Initiative and the Jewish Museum in Prague.
Current Administrative Board members:
Jiří Čistecký (1971) graduated from the School of Economics in Prague. In 1995 studied at Clingendael Institute in The Hague. Since 1994 works at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic. Served as the Commercial Attaché in Bonn and Political Attaché in Berlin in the years 1996-2001. Deputy Chief of Mission at the Embassy of the Czech Republic in Austria in the years 2003-2008. Head of the Central Europe Department at the MFA since 2008.
Prof. Tomáš Kosta (1925), the Chairman of the Administrative Board of ESLI, was born in Prague. During the war he was deported to Theresienstadt, Auschwitz and Buchenwald, he escaped twice from the Death March. His post-war infatuation with communism faded away when his parents were imprisoned during the political processes of the 1950s. Back then Kosta worked as a cook and antiquarian. Since 1953 he worked in publishing business, in the year 1968 he became the director of the publishing house Liberty. In August he emigrated, first to Switzerland and from there to Germany, where he established himself as a key publisher and became an influential actor on the German political scene. He acted to promote the interests of the German social democrats. Writers Gunther Grass and Heinrich Böll or politicians Willy Brandt and Johannes Rau ranked among his close friends. Since 1990 he lives alternately in Prague and Frankfurt am Main. As an advisor on German speaking countries he worked for Czech Prime Ministers Vladimír Špidla, Stanislav Gross, Jiří Paroubek and Jan Fischer. He has also worked as an advisor to the Minister of Foreign Affairs Karel Schwarzenberg. He is a member of PEN Club. In the year 2002 he was awarded State Medal for Merits (II. degree). In 2009 he was among the key participants in the Holocaust Era Assets conference.
Michaela Sidenberg is a Czech-born art historian and curator. A graduate from the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague, she joined the Jewish Museum in Prague in 1996 as the curator of the Museum's collection of Fine Arts. She has since collaborated on many international exhibition projects covering various aspects of Jewish history and culture. An important part of her work as curator is provenance research of Nazi-looted cultural assets. From 1999 to 2000 Sidenberg served as a member on the expert commission established by the Czech government to research and evaluate confiscated Jewish-owned works of art in Czech public collections, and she co-authored the first in-depth study describing the confiscation mechanisms used in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and the fate of looted art in Czechoslovakia after 1945 (Works of Art Confiscated from Jewish Owners in the Czech Lands Between 1938 and 1945, Prague, 2000, unpublished report for the government of the Czech Republic).
Eliška Žigová, PhD (1960), was born in Gdaňsk, Poland. Between 1980 and 1986 she studied Slavic Studies at the Warsaw University and later at the Charles University in Prague, where she gained her PhD. In the year 1995 she started her career at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) of the Czech Republic (CZ). In the years 1995 – 2000 Eliška Žigová worked as the third secretary of the Embassy in the Czech Republic in Warsaw, Poland. From 2000 till 2002 she was the Deputy Director in the Central European Department at MFA in Prague and from the year 2002 till 2005 the Deputy Head of Mission at the Embassy of the Czech Republic in Cairo, Egypt. In the period of 2005-2008 she held the position Head of the Czech Representative Office in Ramallah, Palestine. From March till September 2008 she was the Deputy Director of the Strategy, Analyses and Project Managment Office at MFA in Prague. From September 2008 till August 2012 she became Consul General of the Czech Republic in New York, USA. Since August 2012 she is the Director in the Northern and Eastern Europe Department of MFA. Eliška Žigová is married and has two sons. She speaks english, polish, russian and arabic.
