California: Peter Lande, June 29

Peter Landé, a volunteer at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (Washington DC), will speak at the next meeting of the Jewish Genealogical Society of the Conejo Valley and Ventura County.

The meeting begins at 3pm Sunday, June 29, at Temple Adat Elohim, Thousand Oaks. There is no charge.

Landé is also speaking at the Southern California Genealogical Society Jamboree in Burbank over the weekend and will be at the JGSCV following his program at the conference.

His program, "Genealogical Records from the Holocaust – The Breakthrough??" will focus on the efforts to collect information on individuals persecuted during the Nazi regime, including in the Holocaust. These were centralized through an international agreement establishing the International Tracing Service (ITS) in 1955, in Bad Arolsen, Germany.

The international opening of the ITS archives, the largest collection of records on Holocaust victims and survivors, offers a new window for those seeking information on the fates of family members. While a tremendous step forward, researchers should not expect a panacea and there are still major holes in information on Eastern Europe.

He will cover what is (and isn’t) in the collection and how to access it given that it is not on the web. With 50 million name-cards, providing information on about 17 million people, there is much to do.

Landé has also been involved in a major project to identify and collect in a single computerized database the names of all Holocaust victims and survivors, whether Jewish or non-Jewish, as well as an inventory of thousands of sources of information on Holocaust victims and survivors. He was active in the ultimately successful international effort to open for public access the records of the ITS.

For more details and information on upcoming meetings, click here.