Israel: Jewish Names Conference, August 2009

The Ninth International Conference On Jewish Names will be held as part of The Fifteenth World Congress of Jewish Studies, August 2-6, 2009, at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

The names conference is organised by Bar Ilan University's Prof. Aaron Demsky, of the Department of Jewish History Project for the Study of Jewish Names Faculty of Jewish Studies.

A call for papers in Hebrew or English closes June 15, 2008. For more details, click here.

The 2009 event has five divisions: The Bible and Its World;History of the Jewish People; Rabbinic Literature and Jewish Law and Jewish Thought; Languages, Literatures, and Arts; and Contemporary Jewish Society.

The last conference covered these fields of Jewish studies, including:
Archives, Art, Jewish Women Creativity and Learning, Contemporary Jewish Society, Demography, Folklore, Hebrew Language, History - Antiquity, History - Middle Ages, History - New era, Holcaust Studies. Jewish Education, Jewish Law, Jewish Music, Jewish Names, Jewish Thought, Ladino, Languages, Litereatures and Arts, Medieval Literature, New Hebrew Literature, Rabbinic Literature, Sociology, Talmud, The 19th Congress of Masoretic Studies, The Bible and Its World, The Historical Society of Israel, Theatre, Yiddish, and Zionism

Here are some examples of programs presented at the 14th Congress (see more, including the abstracts, here):

Jewish Names in Bialystok - Zofia Abramowicz

Hebrew Names in the Speech of Georgian Jews - Ruven Enoch

"Perlstecker" and "Golgstecker": Some Specialist Surnames in Tailoring - Bracha Yaniv

The Days of the Week As Jewish Surnames - Michael Falk

Name Changes During the British Mandate - Jean-Pierre Stroweis

Social Stratification and Topography According to the Names Contained in the Register of the Jewish Community of Rome - Yaakov Lattes

Double Given-Names Among Ashkenazic Jewry - Yosef Rivlin

From "Judaismo" to "Sefardismo": Dialectics of Fear in Northern Mexico - Schulamith C. Halevy

Yiddish Folksongs of Religious and National Content from the Collections of the Vernadsky Library in Kiev - Lyudmila Sholokhova

Sephardic Influences in the Liturgy of the Ashkenazi Orthodox Jews of London - Naomi Cohen Zentner

Jewish Personal Names in Fatimid Egypt During the 11th Century - Elinoar Bareket

Geographic Names in Jewish Sources from the Period of the Crusades - Israel Rozenson

Occupations of Bukharan Jews at the End of the 19th Century (Based on Nicknames and Family Names)- Chana Tolmas

Daily Life of Jewish Women in Ottoman Jerusalem During the 19th Century - Yaron Ben Naeh

In Search of Our Lost Spain and Other Sephardic Reflections - Ruth Baher

Engraved in Stone: The Female Voice on the Tombstones of Jewish Cemeteries in Istanbul and Salonika - Gila Hadar

The Immigration of Ladino Speaking Jews from the Ottman Empire to New York in the Early 20th Century - Daniel Florentin

This is only a very small portion of interesting programs. The breadth and depth of this conference should provide food for thought for the program committees of upcoming international conferences on Jewish genealogy.