became during her “official” studies at university (Jewish Studies, Religious Studies,   History) quickly interested in the vast field of Yiddish Studies. She has delved into various facets of Yiddish culture since – from spending more than a year with the poet and songwriter Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman to interning at New York’s YIVO (Jewish Research Institute) sound archive and touring through Brooklyn’s ultra-orthodox Borough-Park.
Janina studied Yiddish language and literature with Cornelia Martyn at Potsdam University, Miriam Hoffman at Columbia University and Dovid Roskies at the Jewish Theological Seminary. She keeps learning from Yiddish experts worldwide and, especially, from conversations with native speakers of different Yiddish dialects in New York, Israel and Chernovitz.
Janina conducted ethnographical interviews in Yiddish, transcribed and translated Yiddish interviews (e.g. for the “Voices of the Holocaust”-project, Chicago), digitized the Stonehill collection (field recordings of mostly Yiddish songs) at YIVO, helped with about 15 CDs of Yiddish music (research, typesetting, translation), operated the supertitles at New York's Yiddish theater Folksbiene, worked as a radio journalist for the Yiddish radio broadcast “Naye khvalyes” (Warsaw, Poland) and published texts and her own photographs in Yiddish periodicals (Forverts, Vayter, Di Tsukunft, Afn Shvel, Dos bletele).
She taught Yiddish language and culture at the international Yiddish summer program in Birobidzhan, Russia, as well as Potsdam University; there, she also gave classes on the TaNaKh and Jewish philosophy.
 She is currently working at the Abraham Geiger College, on David Kohan’s Jewish music archive at Potsdam University.

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