I am a research scientist and applied academic in biology, ecology and genetics. I am the owner and director of the not-for-profit environmental consultancy Nature Heritage. I am fascinated by arts and crafts and I spend my free time producing papercuts, linocuts and diverse crafts.

For me, this activity helps me to focus on the really important things in life and to step beyond the mundane. I love the beauty of the arts and the act of hiddur mitzvah, the beautification of a mitzvah beyond the formal demands of the law, that I create. More importantly, it helps me to express feelings and deep meanings. It helps me in my personal struggle with life's often harsh and unfair realities and what appears a rift between my profession as a natural scientists, who always strived for objectivity, and my own religious quest for the meaning in life, which admittedly has strong subjective dimensions.

I am born in the Saarland, on the border between Germany, France and Luxembourg. The multicultural reality and history of this small fleck of the planet has engrained me with a feeling of being in-between fascinating worlds, as my immediate forebears experienced who changed nationalities repeatedly between France and Germany. This is expressed in my Jewish name, Gershom. It's the name of Moses oldest son, meaning a sojourner there (גר שם ger sham), which references to Moses' flight from Egypt. For me it means stranger in a strange land.

I have lived and worked across the world. Currently, I reside in Chile, South America.

I choose the name Milgroym (= pomegranate) based on it´s symbolic meaning, and the precedence of the artistically and intellectually outstanding journal Milgroym  from the 1920ties. And I love to eat pomegranates and drink pomegranate juice.

Pomegranates are mentioned in the Torah many times. They are are one of the Seven Species of fruits and grains of the land of Israel listed in Deuteronomy 8:8. They are said to have 613 seeds, which corresponds with the 613 mitzvot of the Torah.

Milgroym was a Yiddish language journal published in Berlin between 1922-1924 and was dedicated to Jewish arts. It was one of many  journals founded by Eastern European Jews in Berlin at the beginning of the 1920s, but it was unique due to its visual language. Milgroym was arguably the visually most beautiful Yiddish journal of the interwar period (see article of the Milgroym Project). The political and artistic freedom in early 1920s Weimar Republic and in particular Berlin together with a dynamic mixture of intellectuals, immigrants and artists created a fertile background to Milgroym 's avant-garde quality.

It's aim was to introduce unknown and under-appreciated Jewish art, from medieval to modern, to non-specialist readers. It's target audience were Yiddish speakers anywhere in the diaspora and Palestine.

It achieved it's aim by high-quality articles and colour illustrations imprinted on high-quality paper. This high standard was achievable because the  German inflation allowed very low-cost production for those foreign publishers with access to foreign currency. This advantage became Milgroym's downfall in 1924 after only six published issues because the end of the German inflation and the economic conditions that were suitable for inexpensive publishing ceased in that year leading to the faltering of it's publishing house.

The first literary editors were two well known Yiddish writers, Dovid Bergelson and Der Nister, who were later murdered by Stalin’s purge of Jewish writers. Full scans of the published issues are available at the JPress site, a collection of historic Jewish newspapers in collaboration between the National Library of Israel and Tel Aviv University. A translation of some of the articles can be found at the Milgroym Project including a controversial article on the painter Max Liebermann.