New Mexico: Exploring Jewish roots, October 14

The New Mexico Jewish Historical Society offers an annual workshop on exploring Jewish roots. This year, the event will take place from 1.30-4pm, Sunday, October 14, at the Jewish Community Center in Albuquerque.

No matter your experience level or whether your roots are in northern and eastern Europe, the Mediterranean or the Middle East. Beginning researchers will learn how to start, while those with more experience will be able to meet and network.

Focusing on Sephardic and crypto-Judaic roots, Professor Stanley M. Hordes is adjunct professor of history at the University of New Mexico, and the author of "To the End of the Earth," a history of New Mexico's crypto-Jews. He conducted extensive interviews and archival research in New Mexico, Mexico, Spain and Portugal to establish the genealogy of several New Mexico Hispanic families. He is now studying the Caribbean's crypto-Jews. Hordes' own family name was originally Chodosch (Lithuania and Ukraine) and he visited his ancestral towns in 2005.

Focusing on records for Ashkenazi and Eastern European Jews, Professor Barry Gaines' family is from present-day Ukraine. He's conducted genealogical research at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, the Library of Congress, the British Library and in Ukraine. In 1994 he visited his father's and grandparents' birthplaces in the FSU. His memoir, "Swimming in the Sea of Azov," was published in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. Gaines has taught Shakespeare at the University of New Mexico for 28 years and is the Albuquerque Journal's theater critic.

Admission: $15, NMJHS members; $20, others. For more information, click here.