JGSGW library: New location opens May 4

The Jewish Genealogy Society of Greater Washington (JGSGW) Genealogy Library will open on Sunday, May 4, at its new location in Rockville, Maryland, with some 1,600 items.

Accoding to JGSGW president Marlene Bishow, the collection includes books, newsletters, journals, audio tapes, microfiche, family histories, gazetteers, geographical guides, maps and more. Languages include English, Hebrew, Yiddish, German and Eastern European languages.

For two years, the society's reference-only collection was in boxes and could not be accessed. In September 2007, JGSGW entered into an agreement with B'nai Israel Congregation to co-locate the library in their media center. The society purchased shelving and other library furniture, moved the boxes, and then began shelving and the collection and completing an inventory.

The new location at 6301 Montorse Road in Rockville, Maryland includes the new bookcases, library table and chairs, a microfiche workstation, and 13 PC workstations with internet access. The entire area is WiFi enabled.

The library is open to JGSGW and B'nai Israel Congregation members - with membership or library cards as ID. Hours will be: Sunday (first Sunday of the month, except June-Aug) from 1-3pm, Monday, from 6-8:30pm, and Wednesday from 1-3pm. The library will be closed Monday, May 26 (Memorial Day) and Monday, June 9.

From 11-1pm, Sunday, May 18, the Library Committee will offer an Orientation Workshop for the society and the congregation and the library will also be open on that day following the JGSGW meeting, from 3:30-6pm.

Among the holdings are more than 300 pre-recorded lectures of past programs covering many Jewish genealogy topics. Most are 60 minutes and can be listened to at the 13 library workstations. The audio tapes have been converted to CDs, so users can use the PCs to listen.

The collection includes many genealogy society newsletters, and special arrangements can be made for visiting members of other Jewish genealogical societies.

The JGSGW Library Committee includes librarian Gene Sadick, Vera Finberg and Elaine Apter. Sadick served on the county library board and both Finberg and Apter are trained librarians, each with more than 30 years' experience.

For more information, click the JGSGW website link above.

New York: Auschwitz Torah rededication, May 1

A Torah from Oswiecim (Auschwitz) will be rededicated on Holocaust Remembrance Day - May 1 - at New York City's Central Synagogue.

The back story of how a Torah got from the fetid barracks of Auschwitz to the ark of the Central Synagogue at Lexington Avenue and 55th Street is one the pastor of the Lutheran church down the street sums up as simply “miraculous.”

It is the story of a sexton in the synagogue in the Polish city of Oswiecim who buried most of the sacred scroll before the Germans stormed in and later renamed the city Auschwitz. It is the story of Jewish prisoners who sneaked the rest of it — four carefully chosen panels — into the concentration camp.

It is the story of a Polish Catholic priest to whom they entrusted the four panels before their deaths. It is the story of a Maryland rabbi who went looking for it with a metal detector. And it is the story of how a hunch by the rabbi’s 13-year-old son helped lead him to it.

Central Synagogue's Rabbi Peter J. Rubinstein says the Torah “is such an extraordinary symbol of rebirth.” For two decades the congregation has observed the day with its neighbor, St. Peter's Lutheran Church, whose senior pastor is Rev. Amandus J. Derr

Says Derr, the Torah from Auschwitz “is a very concrete, tactile piece of that remembrance — of what people, some of whom did it in the name of Christ, did to people who were Jewish, and the remembrance itself enables us to be prepared to prevent that from happening again.”

Many Torah scrolls have disappeared or were destroyed during the Holocaust and a core of dedicated individuals have worked to repair those scrolls that have been found, to make them fit - kosher - for use at services. This one was hidden for more than 60 years.

The nonprofit Save a Torah foundation began looking for this particular scroll some eight years ago, following stories heard by its head, Rabbi Menachem Youlus of Wheaton, MD. Over 20 years, the group has found and restored more than 1,000 desecrated scrolls.

Youlus had heard a story told by Auschwitz survivors: Three nights before the Germans arrived, the synagogue sexton put the Torah scrolls in a metal box and buried them, but the survivors didn't know where it was buried. After the war, it could not be found.

The rabbi felt it would be in the cemetery and on his trip to Auschwitz in 2000 or 2001, with a metal detector, he searched but found nothing, and went home. One of his sons, then 13, wondered if the cemetery was the same size as in 1939. From online resources, land records indicated that the present cemetery was much smaller. He returned in 2004 with his metal detector, which beeped as he passed a house built since the war.

The metal box was uncovered, but the scroll was missing four panels; he wondered why. He placed an ad in a Polish newspaper asking if anyone had Hebrew-lettered parchment. A priest answered the next day: He said, "I know exactly what you’re looking for, four panels of a Torah."

The priest - who was born Jewish - said the panels were taken into the camp by four people, who gave them to him before they were killed; he kept the four pieces until he saw the ad. The priest, who has since died, knew that the person who placed the ad had found the rest of the scroll.

Read more here.

Yad Vashem: Online Photo Archive opens May 1

Marking Holocaust Remembrance Day tomorrow (May 1), Yad Vashem will upload its photo archives to its website. Some 130,000 images from the collection - the largest of its kind in the world - will be uploaded on Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day, May 1.

Images include photographs taken in ghettos, during deportations, slave labor, camps, liberation and others. They represent an invaluable asset to historians, educators, writers, filmmakers and the public.

A significant part of this collection is now being made available to the public.

Users will be able to search the database by topic, name or location. High quality scans of images may be ordered for a fee via a site link.

As an additional feature, the images are also linked to existing information about the content. When a visitor clicks on an image, a Google map will automatically open, showing the location of places mentioned in the caption. Other links enable expanded searches.

“Over the last few years, Yad Vashem has invested significantly in the computerization of its various collections,” said Avner Shalev, Chairman of Yad Vashem. “This will allow the public at large direct and simple access to the vast collection of resources collected by Yad Vashem over the past half century. We are hoping that it will increase public awareness of the archives’ tremendous importance, and encourage people who have similar photographs and documents to confer them to Yad Vashem for safekeeping.”

Dr. Haim Gertner, Yad Vashem Archives director, “We are hoping that the public will join us in our ongoing efforts to decipher the pictures and identify the people in them.”

Yad Vashem’s photographic collection began with the gathering of individual and group photographs immediately following World War II. When the Archives opened in 1955, these collections were incorporated. In 1983, a separate photographic department was established, to collate, catalogue and research historic photographs relating to the Holocaust. Photographs come from a variety of sources, including official archives, private collections, museums and various historic collections.

Some examples:

- Tova Mendel (with kerchief) and Salomon Findling (tall man behind Tova) and their children Frederika, Helena, Mikulas and Israel, along with other Jews, being deported from Stropkov, Slovakia on May 23, 1942.

- May 27, 1944- - Jews who had just undergone selection at Auschwitz-Birkenau and were classified as “not fit for work” in a grove before being gassed.

- Lighting Hanukkah candles in the Westerbork camp in the Netherlands.

Los Angeles: 2010 conference set

Intrepid Jewish genealogists around the world keep close track of our international conferences and plan their vacations around these annual events. Thus, I wanted to let readers know as soon as possible about this new development.

Mark your calendars now for the 30th IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy, which will be hosted by the Jewish Genealogical Society of Los Angeles from July 11-16, 2010.

Los Angeles, the entertainment capital of the world, offers significant and varied resources for genealogical research. The conference hotel will be the newly constructed JW Marriott at L.A. LIVE, located in downtown Los Angeles's new and vibrant cultural, entertainment and gastronomic center.

It is good to know that the event will once again return to the West Coast, hosted by the very talented JGSLA membership, headed by current president Sandy Malek.

And, as always, Tracing the Tribe looks forward to providing readers with all the details as they are released.

Congratulations, JGSLA.

Before we get to Los Angeles, of course, there is the 28th conference in Chicago (August 15-22) this year, and then the 29th conference hosted by the Jewish Genealogical Society of Greater Philadelphia in August 2-7, 2009.

Moroccan library, MJH agree on exchange

The National Library of Morocco and New York's Museum of Jewish Heritage have agreed to exchange information and documents under an agreement signed in the Moroccan capital.

The agreement, signed on Tuesday, provides for developing technical co-operation and boosting inter-cultural and inter-religious dialogue, according to the Moroccan national radio.

The agreement is geared towards reinforcing the cultural exchange and sharing of technical know-how between the two institution, said National Library director Driss Khrouz to National Radio.

The Museum of Jewish Heritage will have access to documents available in all universities and libraries across Morocco, he said, adding that the national library will contribute to digitalizing fundamental historical documents, magazines and papers.

The signing took place in the presence of Andre Azoulay, King Mohammed VI's adviser on Jewish affairs, and Rabat's US Ambassador Thomas Riley.

California: Steve Morse speaks, May 10

The California Genealogical Society has scheduled a double treat for its members and friends at 1pm Saturday, May 10, when Steve Morse will speak at its membership meeting. The venue is the CGS Library in Oakland.

Morse's talks will be "What Color Ellis Island Search Form Should I Use?" and “The Jewish Calendar Demystified.”

The first talk describes the evolution of the One-Step Ellis Island Web site to the One-Step Web Pages. In April 2001, Ellis Island's ship manifests and passenger records went online. A few weeks later the One-Step Ellis Island website was created to make this resource easier to use. Since that time the One-Step site has been greatly expanded to include new search capabilities and an array of color-coded search forms.

He will describe the evolution of the website from both a historical and a practical perspective, and provide a beacon for navigating through this color maze.

Those of us who have previously seen Steve's calendar presentation realize how funny it is - he has a great sense of humor. It is highly recommended. His tongue-in-cheek but factual description of the Jewish Calendar is seen through the eyes of Adam and Eve. Because the calendar is both a solar and lunar calendar, rules concerning calculation can be daunting. The piece was recently published in the Association of Professional Genealogists Quarterly which reflects its general appeal. It's not just for people doing Jewish genealogy (and is a very humorous talk!)

Founded February 12, 1898 in San Francisco, the CGS is a non-profit, all-volunteer organization that seeks to aid, educate and encourage research in family history. The society maintains a library, gathers and preserves vital records and disseminates information through publications, meetings, seminars, workshops, its Web site, blog and online catalog.

For more details about the group and the event, click here.

Yad Vashem launches English, Arabic YouTube channels

Yad Vashem has launched YouTube channels in Arabic and English in time for Holocaust Remembrance Day on May 1.

Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance and education center in Jerusalem, has launched two YouTube channels in advance of Holocaust Remembrance Day on May 1. The channels, in English and Arabic, went live today.

The English channel contains testimonies from Holocaust survivors, including archival footage, historians’ lectures on key issues related to the Holocaust, footage from visits to Yad Vashem, including those of President George W. Bush in January 2008, and Pope John Paul II in March 2000, as well as human interest stories, such as family reunions.

The Arabic channel has testimonies and archival footage about the Holocaust, with Arabic subtitles.

The channels are dynamic, and new videos will be added frequently. Channels in additional languages will be added soon.

“We know that YouTube is one of the most popular websites today. This is equally true in the United States and Europe as it is in Arabic speaking countries. Unfortunately, there is a plethora of misinformation and deliberate lies available on the Internet.

"The Yad Vashem channel will counter this material, and make reliable information widely available to anyone who seeks to know more about this terrible chapter in human history,” said Avner Shalev, Chairman of Yad Vashem. “By meeting the survivors through their testimonies, and viewing the foremost experts in the field address difficult questions, viewers will be able to connect on yet another level to this pivotal, and defining event.”

The English channel is here; the Arabic channel here.

Yad Vashem thanked Google and YouTube for their help in launching the new channels.

Holocaust: Albanian heroes

This week, as the world approaches International Holocaust Remembrance Day on May 1, there will be many stories about what happened during this terrible period of history: stories of people, of tragedy and heartache, but also of heroism. This story focuses on the Jewish experience in Albania and the Muslim people who saved many Jews.

Somebody saved Anna Kohen's family. When Nazis marched into Albania in 1943, a few years before she was born, Kohen's parents fled the coastal city of Vlora for a village in the mountains. Six decades later, Kohen still wonders about the Muslim family that absorbed her own Jewish one.

"I want to go and find the ones that saved my parents," she said recently from her Manhattan dental practice, where a file holds two clues she unearthed last year: the rescuers' first and last names. "I always knew that they saved us. I never forgot."

Obscured in the history of Nazi conquest and European complicity is the story of Albania, a country on the Balkan Peninsula that shielded every Jew within its borders and saved as many as 1,800 others. Many of these rescue stories have been lost to the era's confounding flux of people, to time and to the humility of the samaritans themselves.

This month, the Federation, Jewish Communities of Western Connecticut began a search for those anonymous heroes. Its goal is to find some of these altruistic among Waterbury's large Albanian community, and honor them. Odds are against them.

As of 2007, Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority whose responsibility includes recognition of "Righteous Among the Nations" had honored more than 22,000 of these righteous individuals from 44 countries. Of those, an estimated 1,700 are still alive.

Some have been captured in stirring black-and-white photographs by Norman Gershman, now on exhibit at the Jewish Federation's Southbury facility.

Yad Vashem in Jerusalem continuously searches to honor the Righteous Gentiles, non-Jews who helped Jews during those terrible times. It is still possible as clues still turn up.

In 1998, Yad Vashem found a former school cleaning lady from Lithuania whose family saved hundreds of Jews. Danuta Venclauskas' photo hangs above the desk of the Jewish Federation's executive director. She never shared her story until a year before her death.

"It was a matter of fact," he said. Or, too painful. "Who was Danuta? She used to clean the schools. She lived in this old rundown house. Nobody knew who she was until one of the young boys she hid ... put her in to be recognized."

There were more Jews in Albania at the end of thje war than at the beginning. The reason for this, in a mainly Muslim nation, was termed "besa," a code of honor. It means to keep the promise and combines pride, honor, trust and hospitality.

"Besa means trust. When I trust you, I give you anything because I trust you," Medi Coma explained from a desk at the Albanian Culture Center and mosque in the Overlook section of Waterbury, where the 60-something grandfather serves as president to the 4,000-member organization, one of two in the city.

Many ethnic Albanians live in the Balkans, as borders changed under various occupations. When the Ottoman Empire expanded to Albania, the people converted to Islam, and despite being outlawed for five centuries, their language survived.

In 1943, as Nazis closed in on the heavily Jewish Macedonian town of Manastir, Coma's cousin, Shabedin Aga, led a caravan of 18 donkeys carrying several Jewish families to safety. He brought them to his village near the border-straddling Lake Ohrid, about 50 miles away. It's a story Coma, of Wolcott, grew up hearing, one whose relics sat for years in his cousin's home.

Aga, a supplier, regularly trekked across Albania, from the seaside town of Durres to Manastir, where he delivered salt and other commodities to Jewish shopkeepers. On one trip, the shopkeepers asked Coma's cousin to help them flee their city, which sat precariously on a rail line connecting Germany and Greece. Word was Nazis were pushing south. The desperate Jews offered Aga money for passage to, and shelter in, Albanian villages. He declined the money. Instead, he recruited Coma's father, Vebi Coma, and a cousin to guide about 35 Jews through the mountains on donkeys. Coma's father told him what happened when they returned a second time to pick up more Jews.

They had all been wiped out. Coma relates a story of a Jewish family that left a large stack of money in gratitude. His cousin kept it for the family, and says the money is still somewhere here, even now. His cousin died nearly 50 years ago.

When Norman Gershman began traveling to the Balkans in 2003 to photograph Muslim families who helped Jews, he was continually shown items they left behind and asked if the owners would return to get them. They assured him that the Jewish possessions are still safe.

Gershman's exhibition of black-and-white images came to the town from the United Nations.

For the complete story, click here for the Waterbury (CT) Republican-American.

Seattle: Jeff Malka speaks, May 12

Seattle's genealogical and Sephardic communities are in for a great treat when Sephardic genealogy pioneer researcher Dr. Jeffrey S. Malka speaks there in a few weeks.

The event begins at 7pm Monday, May 12, at the Ezra Bessaroth congregation and co-sponsored by Sephardic Bikur Holim, presented by the Jewish Genealogical Society of Washington State.

I've known Jeff for years and he's a fascinating speaker with a great grasp of the subject. He will focus on "Sephardic Genealogy Resources and the Historical Importance of Ancient Sephardic Surnames."

The presentation will include an overview of Sephardic genealogy resources, what they have in common with traditional Ashkenazi genealogy resources, and how they differ.

Because Sephardic surnames are often so ancient, they are very important to Sephardic genealogy. Records and other resources in various selected countries include the vast volume of pre-expulsion Spanish documents, with illustrations that demonstrate how useful and relevant these are in documenting the persistence of old surnames.

Also shown will be tools to help decipher the marked differences in Hebrew script found in Sephardic documents that make them undecipherable, even to native Hebrew speakers born in Israel and to most academics.

A retired professor of orthopedic surgery in the Washington DC area, Dr. Jeffrey Malka is the author of the award-winning book "Sephardic Genealogy: Discovering Your Sephardic Ancestors and Their World" (Avotaynu, 2002) and the creator of JewishGen's Sephardic SIG website based on his previous Sephardic Genealogy Resources website, now updated and renamed SephardicGen.com.

Descended from a long line of Sephardic rabbis going back to 14th century Kabbalists and authors (as well as Catalan blacksmiths and money lenders), he is one of the pioneers of Sephardic genealogy in the United States and a well-known lecturer on the subject.

Jeff has been an invited lecturer at the Library of Congress, several IAJGS annual conferences, the Washington Jewish Historical Society, and numerous Jewish Genealogy Societies in the U.S., Canada. His appearance in Barcelona, Spain two years ago drew an audience of more than 100, a cross-section of the Jewish community as well as a wide general audience.

For more information, email programs@jgsws.org or click here. I note that kosher refreshments will be served and hope they are the gastronomic handiwork of the Ladies Auxiliary's amazing cooks. There is nothing more delicious than Sephardic delicacies.

For more on the congregation, click here, and if you'd like to hear Ein Kelohenu in Hebrew and Ladino as sung by Hazzan Isaac Azose, click here. I look forward to seeing jovial Ike Azose each time I visit Seattle. I'm hoping to see all our Seattle cousins and friends in late July.

Free admission for JGSWS members; $5 for non-members.

Montreal: Experts share, April 29

Member experts will share personal family history stories and research tips at the next meeting of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Montreal. The event begins at 7pm, Tuesday, April 29, at the Gelber Conference Center.

Beatrice Freder's research focuses on the Awerbuck and Rabinowitch families of Brusilov, Ukraine and the Kreadenster family of Dobrovka, Ukraine and Toronto, Canada.

Bernice Goldsmith's focus is on Kiev, Ukraine and the Zatolofsky family, while Barry Simon plans to relate research on his mother's family from Rimbach, Germany, her Kindertransport experiences and follow this with more contemporary family history in Canada.

As each recounts their research experiences and presents Powerpoint lectures, they'll also share personal successes and tips for other researchers.

For more information, click here.

The group's website also holds details on various indexes its members have compiled, such as cemetery, census and vital record indexes. Included are 200,000 people in the first phase of Canadian Naturalizations 1914-1932; 75,000 vital records for the Jewish community in Montreal and Quebec, 1911 Canadian Census, the Back River Cemetery, and 45,000 burials in the Baron de Hirsch - De la Savane Cemetery.

Television: Nazi Scrapbooks from Hell, April 27

"Nazi Scrapbooks From Hell" will be shown on the National Geographic Channel at 9pm Sunday, April 27, and repeated at midnight. It will also be screened at 2pm Sunday, May 4.

The channel's website describes the program:

"The death camp at Auschwitz was considered ground zero for the killings during the Holocaust, a place where thousands were starved and 1.1 million died, but there are only a small number of known photos of this infamous place before its liberation in 1945.until now. The photos of this album are far from the gruesome iconic images of living skeletons or ash-choked ovens. These rare images show life from the other side of the wire, where the banality of evil is depicted by cocktail parties, sing-a-longs and food contests attended by the perpetrators. Another album showcases the victims as they arrive at Auschwitz. These albums are nothing short of scrapbooks from hell."

For more information on the scrapbooks, click here.

Thanks to Joy Rich of New York for this tip.

Miami: A trip to Shereshev, May 4

Jewish Genealogical Society of Greater Miami will focus on roots travel, when Martin Zafman presents "A trip to Shereshev and other ancestral towns."

The meeting begins at 10am, Sunday, May 4 at the Greater Miami Jewish Federation 4200 Biscayne Blvd. See the website for more details.

Zafman will share his adventures with his cousin in Belarus and Poland, an unforgettable trip that brought his mother's stories to life and took them inside the houses of their ancestors.

From Warsaw and Bialystok to Grodno, Pruzhany, Shereshev, Brest, Terespol, Białowieża and Narewka, they found family documents in the archives, toured with a Holocaust survivor, visited with a mayor and residents and were transported back to the 19th century as they walked in the footsteps of their ancestors.

Many beautiful photos are in their Belarus SIG online newsletter article, "A Trip to Shereshev" by David Feldman and Zafman.

His presentation last year - "Life in the Pale of Settlement and Feldbaum-Zafman Family Research" - focused on how 19th century Jewish families lived in the old country, how he traced his family back to the early 1700s and plans for their trip.

A graduate of New York University, Marty has served on boards of several organizations and is currently a docent at the Jewish Museum of Florida.

The CAJE Library will also be open so members can peruse genealogy reference books.

California: Faith and Tolerance film, May 4

In commemoration of Yom Hashoah (International Holocaust Remembrance Day), the Jewish Genealogical Society of the Conejo Valley and Ventura County will screen "Hiding and Seeking: Faith and Tolerance After the Holocaust," by Oren Rudavsky and Menachem Daum

The meeting begins at 2pm, Sunday, May 4, at Temple Adat Elohim in Thousand Oaks. There is no charge.

Is it possible to heal wounds and bitterness passed down through generations? An Orthodox Jewish father tries to alert his adult sons to the dangers of creating impenetrable barriers between themselves and those outside their faith.

He takes them on an emotional journey to Poland to track down the family who risked their lives to hide their grandfather for more than two years during World War II.

Like many children of survivors, the sons feel that Poland is a country that is incurably anti-Semitic, but it is precisely here that they meet people who personify the highest levels of compassion. “Hiding and Seeking” explores the Holocaust's effect on faith in God as well as faith in our fellow human beings.

For more information, click here

Florida: David Levy Yulee

We can find evidence of our ancestors in many unusual places, such as the Great Floridians 2000 program which includes the state's first US Senator and the first US Jewish senator on a plaque in Fernandina Beach.

David Levy Yulee was Florida’s first United States Senator and the builder of Florida’s first cross-state railroad. He was born David Levy in 1810 on St. Thomas, British West Indies. He was admitted to the bar in 1836 and served, first as a delegate to the state constitutional convention in 1838 and then as territorial delegate to Congress from 1841 to 1845. David Levy was elected to the United States Senate in 1845, becoming the nation’s first Jewish senator. The next year he added the name of his father’s Sephardic ancestry, Yulee. Yulee operated sugar plantations on the Homosassa River and in Alachua County and organized Florida’s first railroad in the 1850s, linking the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Yulee served in the Confederate Congress, was briefly imprisoned following the war, and rebuilt his railroad, which had been destroyed. Yulee moved to Washington, D.C., in 1880. He died six years later and is buried there. Levy County and the town of Yulee (Nassau County) are among the Florida places named for him. His Great Floridian plaque is found at the Fernandina Chamber of Commerce, 102 Centre Street, Fernandina Beach.

If you would like to add the plaque to your GPS list:

N 30° 40.274 W 081° 27.880
17R E 455488 N 3393259

Jewish studies: International primary sources

Salon Jewish Studies bills itself as the "Gateway to Primary Sources for Research in Jewish History and Culture, and is compiled by Dajena and Frank Schlöffel of Brandenburg, Germany.

Its various sections are continually under construction, such as "Archives in France," more than 30 "Libraries in the US" with major Jewish collections, 60 "Research Institutes in the US," and 40 "US Archives." Readers may wish to subscribe to receive updates.

Categories include finding aids, digitized resources, archives, libraries, research institutes.

Finding Aids offer national and international library catalogs and specialized catalogs. Digitized resource sections will include: Multilingual, Hebrew, English, German, Yiddish, Ladino, Special: Image-, Sound- & Video Collections. Archives will include North America, US, Asia/Middle East, Europe, as well as personal collections and oral histories.

A March 14 entry details a new digitization project:

Porta Hebraicorum - A new Digitalization-Project
The Bavarian State Library plans to digitize its significant Hebraica-Collection in Cooperation with the Chair für Jewish History and Culture at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich and the Faculty for Information-Science and Technics Cologne. After the pilot-phase 130 titles are going to be available through the WWW as Porta Hebraicorum.

Objects of research are some of the worldwide most significant Hebraica preserved in the Bavarian State Library. They survived the Second World War and National Socialism nearly undamaged. There are some 2,700 titles from 1501-1933. Similar libraries have been transferred to other countries or destroyed.

The Porta Hebraicorum has a wealth of information. Unfortunately, much is still in German with no current translation available; however, this appears to be an upcoming feature. There are also photos of some of the collection's books.

Forensic Genealogy: Waltham, MA, April 26

Sharon Sergeant of Ancestral Manor will present the impact of the Misha DeFonseca Holocaust international fraud case in Waltham, Massachusetts, on Saturday, April 26.

She will speak about the many forensic genealogy lessons and implications for all genealogists, at the annual meeting and seminar of the Massachusetts Genealogical Council.

The MGC Seminar will also have a day packed with tips and tools of the trade from experts on records access, technology and networking, family rogues (rather than frauds), unusual sources (institutions and state censuses), under documented populations (African American and Portuguese), and disasters (fires and weather) [for more details, click here] .

This case demonstrates that forensic genealogy has wider applications than the more traditional heir searching or property settlements. Modern fraud issues and historical mythologies can be solved with the same methodology.

Image time lines and story boards are on a par with data mining, time line and evidence analysis methodology, as well as DNA cladagram analysis and science.

A photo time line provided the divining rod for the Defonseca case. The document proofs came out of an exhaustive and methodical search based on the historical and geographical context. But - had Defonseca continued to claim that she wasn't the same person in the document trail - and not confessed to her fraud, we were prepared to go after DNA tests with living relatives.

Open records access incentives and the methods needed to work around closed records are also paramount issues.

Additional cases coming up, says Sergeant, include:

-A European publication of a recent Defonseca "copy cat" (Defonseca had a 20-year run) will soon be exposed based on a "this is the same person" time line that destroys the central theme of yet another World War II story fraud.

-A writer exploring his own family's Civil War roles is developing a theme for a book that dismantles many myths that today's public figures maintain - yet is legitimately concerned with defensive defamation suits.

-The descendant of a European World War II orphan is concerned that their own family's story can be told with the proper documentation.

-A middle aged woman with an Asian adopted child has decided to find her father's family - more than 50 years after he deserted his wife and children.

-An elderly person with a patchwork quilt of previous personal and professional inquiry into their own family roots decides that it is time to resolve the "unsolved mysteries."

Sergeant says that other forensic genealogy lessons will be offered in the coming weeks in Illinois, Missouri, Ontario, Canada and California. Click here for Dr. Colleen Fitzpatrick's program schedule.

New York: Young Sephardim, May 15

The Center for Jewish History in New York will sponsor a panel discussion on how young Sephardic Jews are discovering and reconnecting to their history through their own creative processes, at 7pm, Thursday, May 15.

Moderated by The Forward's Arts and Culture editor Alana Newhouse, the "Young Artists Exploring Our Heritage: A Journey Where Art Meets History" panel will feature Michael J. Cohen, co-author, Aromas of Aleppo: The Legendary Cuisine of Syrian Jews; Michelle Ishay-Cohen, producer and art director, Aromas of Aleppo: The Legendary Cuisine of Syrian Jews; and Lisa Ades, documentary filmmaker.

Admission is $10; $5 for American Sephardi Federation members and students.
For more details, click here.

Toronto: Founding a Jewish cemetery

If you have roots in Toronto, this story talks about the area's 11 Jewish cemeteries . Today, the community is about 200,000 strong.

There is also a video on Holy Blossom Cemetery.

Nine are active, two are closed to burials:

• Pape Avenue Cemetery (Holy Blossom or Jews' Cemetery), 1849 (closed)

• Jones Avenue Cemetery, 1883 (partially active)

• Dawes Road Cemetery, 1903 (active)

• Roselawn Avenue Cemetery, 1905 (active)

• Lambton Mills Cemetery (Royal York Rd.), 1909 (active)

• Mount Sinai Memorial Park, 1920 (active)

• Bathurst Lawn Memorial Park / Woods Cemetery, 1929 (active)

• Holy Blossom Memorial Park, 1929 (active)

• Beth Tzedek Memorial Park, 1949 (active)

• Shaarei Shomayim Cemetery / Machzika B'nai Israel, 1933 (closed)

• Pardes Shalom / Toronto Hebrew Memorial Park, 1975 (active)

Over the next few weeks, volunteers from the Jewish Genealogical Society of Toronto will visit every grave in the area, armed with digital cameras to photograph the stones to record the inscriptions for posterity.

Holy Blossom was also known as Pape Avenue Cemetery or Jews' Cemetery, and in the area where the community's roots began some 160 years ago.

Jews settling a new area are charged with first organizing a consecrated cemetery before a synagogue is established.

In 1849, there were only about three dozen Jews in the city; two businessmen (jeweller Judah Joseph and piano maker Abraham Nordheimer)paid £20 to purchase land east of town for the cemetery. Joseph's son Samuel was ill this provided impetus to the plot purchase, as the closest Jewish cemeteries were in Montreal and Buffalo. The boy is believed to be the first person buried in the cemetery in 1850.

Ontario Jewish Archives director Ellen Scheinberg says Pape Cemetery was the resting place for all the city's first Jewish families and for others who came later.

Read more about the location, and the cemetery which closed some 70 years ago. Visitors still come to see relatives' graves.

While none of the earliest tombstones survives – all that is known of Samuel Joseph's grave is that it was near the gate – the history in the local Jewish community can nonetheless be read in those that remain.

There are names and dates, of course, but there are also subtle hints about the community's identity. Birthplaces listed on the oldest stones include villages in England while Germany and Eastern Europe are on later ones. Eventually, Toronto is listed.

As well, some of the original stones are inscribed entirely in Hebrew or German, while later ones contain a mix of Hebrew, German and English.

The city's first synagogue was built a decade after the cemetery on Pape. Today there are 118 synagogues and congregations in the Toronto area and some 80 Jewish schools, as well as many Jewish organizations and institutions.

Chicago 2008: Trains, planes and food

The conference committee for the 28th IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy (Chicago, August 17-22) has announced important updates:

1. Discounts are available for Amtrak, American Airlines and Continental Airlines,

2. Menus are now posted for luncheons and the banquet. Shabbat dinner, Saturday welcome dinner and breakfast menus are expected soon, and

3. Early bird registration ends April 30, so register early and save some money.

For all updates, registration, hotel, program schedule, etc. go to the conference website.

Ohio: Family history in synagogue curtain

The Cincinnati Inquirer's story on linking a family's history to a parokhet (curtain for the Ark - the cabinet that holds Torah scrolls), is here.

Siegmund Gutman always felt he had a relatively small extended family because of the toll the Holocaust took on his Russian, Polish and Austrian ancestors.

Recently, the Cincinnati Hillel Jewish Student Center in Clifton brought Gutman's family history into focus and that led the Los Angeles attorney to dedicate an artifact in the center's collection.

Rabbi Abie Ingber and others at Cincinnati Hillel discovered a connection between Gutman and the original purchase of an ark curtain in 1885 for one of the largest synagogues in Europe. The Viennese curtain, used to cover the area in a synagogue where the Torah scroll is kept, survived World War II.

"When I spoke to my grandparents, there was a richness of history they taught me about my Jewish heritage," said Gutman, 40. "Learning about this ark curtain has added to that richness and given me an opportunity to pass that on to my daughter."

Gutman and his wife, Stephanie Hertzman, visited Cincinnati this week to dedicate the ark curtain in honor of their 1-year-old daughter, Micah. It is displayed in Cincinnati's Hillel chapel. The center has more than 400 other Jewish artifacts and pieces of history.

A local resident bought and donated the velvet cloth cloth to Hillel. The embroidered inscription reads in part: "donated graciously by Mr. Isak Zev Ritter von Gutmann and his wife ... as a remembrance before God of the day that their beloved son Moses became a Bar Mitzvah."

Rabbi Ingber mentioned the cloth to a Hillel supporter whose son-in-law had the same last name. Research revealed Siegmund Gutman was a descendant of the same Gutman family in Vienna who were Stadttempel (City Temple) members where the curtain was from. It was the only Viennese synagogue to survive the 1938 Kristallnacht.

"If this ark curtain could speak, how would it feel to see the descendant of the family that gave it life? And how would it feel to hear Schubert, the music that dedicated its synagogue?" Ingber said.

For Gutman, the passion for dedicating the piece again is rooted in preserving this piece of Jewish and family history.

The curtain and other Hillel artifacts may be viewed at the congregation.

Cape Verde: Jewish roots

Journalist Carol Castiel spoke about the history of the Jews of Cape Verde at the last international Jewish genealogy conference in Washington, DC (2003), and presented an excellent look at their Jewish roots.

The Boston Globe carried a story yesterday on Cape Verdeans joining together for a Passover seder in Roxbury.

This is what Joel Schwartz had in mind when he organized the first Cape Verdean Seder three years ago. After all, Jews have long used the themes of Passover, commemorating the liberation of the Israelites from Egyptian bondage, to reach out to other communities.

Schwartz, who has worked with Cape Verdeans as program manager with the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization for 16 years, didn't realize then what many Cape Verdeans have quietly known for generations: Many of them have Jewish ancestry. Nor did he know until last week that this year's Seder would draw Jews and Cape Verdeans from as far away as Washington, D.C., seeking to reforge this historic bond.

The Jewish presence on Cape Verde can be traced back to its earliest days, when Portugal discovered and claimed the tiny chain of islands off the west coast of Africa in the mid-1400s. With the start of the Inquisition, many Jews, forced to convert or hide their identity, fled to Cape Verde and other Portuguese colonies in hopes of getting out from under the heel of the religious authorities.

Starting in the mid-1800s, Jews from Morocco began going to the islands. While these newcomers eventually assimilated into the general population, their imprint remains in family names like Cohen, Levy, and Wahnon, a name borne by the country's first elected prime minister. There is also a village called Sinagoga (synagogue) and a few cemeteries with Hebrew inscriptions.

All of this piqued the curiosity of Carol Castiel when she was working in West Africa for a US aid agency in the mid-1990s.

"Over the years, I began noticing these names that were typically Jewish, and these connections somehow came out," said Castiel, a Jewish journalist who traveled from Washington, D.C., to attend last week's Seder.

The discovery sent her on a mission to preserve the islands' Jewish heritage. She recently founded the Cape Verde Jewish Heritage Project, with the aim of raising funds to restore the cemeteries and promote education and tourism centered on the country's Jewish history.

Over the years, the connections have been impacted by time and intermarriage, although, according to the story, some 30% of the Cape Verdeans thought they had Jewish ancestry. Although this was news to Schwartz, Cape Verdeans have long been aware of their Jewish roots.

"My father told us about the Jews in our family," said Jacinto Benros, who is 75 and lives in Providence. (New England is home to the largest population of Cape Verdean immigrants and descendants in the country, estimated by the US State Department at a few hundred thousand.)

Other Cape Verdeans have taken recognition of their Jewish heritage much further. Gershom Barros, whose father was Cape Verdean, underwent the exhaustive process of converting to Orthodox Judaism. Barros didn't know his father had Jewish roots until after he died.

"My mother told me she used to call my grandmother a crazy lady for lighting candles in the closet," he said, suggesting that she practiced secret Jewish customs passed down for generations, as has been noted among other descendants of Portuguese and Spanish Jews who were forced to hide their identities.

Although not mentioned in this story, we heard in Washington DC stories of families first having a Jewish marriage and then going to the Church for a Catholic ceremony.

Boston University Jewish history professor Marilyn Halter wrote a book on this community's immigration and married a Cape Verdean-American.

Click on the link above to learn more.

Pennsylvania: Jewish history

Did you know that Philadelphia's first Jewish inhabitant, Nathan Levy, arranged for shipping the Liberty Bell across the Atlantic so it could ring in the 1776 signing of the Declaration of Independence?

Levy - originally living in New York - sought a business opportunity in the Pennsylvania colony and obtained the first Jewish property to bury his young son in 1740. The communal Jewish cemetery still exists today on land received from William Penn's family.

Penn received from the British monarchy the rights to all of the Pennsylvania colony's land and tried to set up a colony based on Quaker principles, including tolerance of difference faiths, including Jewish.

During the American Revolution, some 250 Jews lived in Pennsylvania as many of them fled New York when it was held by the British. The first synagogue - one of the oldest in the US - was built with the help of Benjamin Franklin. The first Ashkenazi synagogue was built 14 years later.

Some 300,000 Jews live in Pennsylvania (of a general population of 12 million); 240,000 Jews live in the Philadelphia metropolitan area and another 40,000 live in Pittsburgh.

Readers are reminded that the 29th IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy will be co-hosted by the Jewish Genealogical Society of Greater Philadelphia from August 2-7, 2009 - so mark your calendars now.

The article is longer, but is not really about about Jewish history - rather it details the politics of the president race. If you are interested, click here.

Shanghai: Ohel Rachel's first wedding in 60 years

In 1920, the Ohel Rachel synagogue in Shanghai was built by Iraqi and Indian Sephardi businessman. Although officially in the hands of the city's education ministry, it was once used as storage, occasionally now as an auditorium, and was named one of the World Monuments Fund 100 most endangered sites in 2002 and 2004.

While the community was a refuge, since the early 1920s, for Russian Jews and others later fleeing the Holocaust from Germany, the Chinese government took possession of the building in 1949 and Jews began to immigrate to other countries. Today, however, the Jewish community is growing again with some 2,000 living in the city.

Almost all Jewish symbolism has disappeared from the building, except for an exterior plaque, a Magen David at the top of a stairway and a Hebrew sign inside. Since being rededicated 10 years ago, it has only opened for major holidays a few days a year.

Recently it was the site of the synagogue's first Jewish wedding in 60 years. Moroccan businessman and head of the Shanghai community Maurice Ohana wanted to hold his daughter's wedding there.

Ohana finally succeeded in obtaining permission with help from Pan Guang, the dean of the Center of Jewish Studies Shanghai, who assisted in the long negotiation.

"We tried to explain the importance to the Jewish community," Pan said after the wedding, as the crowd of about 400 in evening dress swirled by. Some in the new Jewish community have family connections to the past, he added.

Some were at the wedding. "My father was a Russian Jew in Shanghai," said Jim Kaptzan, a U.S. businessman who said his father came after fleeing the 1917 communist revolution in Russia. "He used to always tell me Shanghai was the place to be. It's heartwarming to be in the place where my father prayed freely."

In the old days, the cosmopolitan city had a thriving Jewish community, with schools, newspapers and seven synagogues. However, from the 1950s-mid-1990s, there was little or no Jewish presence. Ohel Moishe - the only other remaining synagogue -is a Jewish history museum.

Among the 400 guests were diplomats representing Israel, the US, France, Argentina and Morocco. Rabbi Shalom Greenberg officiated, assisted by rabbis from Singapore and Beijing.

For more, click here.

Happy Passover to readers!

A very happy holiday to all Tracing the Tribe's readers.

Whether you celebrate it as Passover, Pesach, Pessah, Pesaj or Santo Moises (as converso/anousim families do), it all begins this Saturday night.

As you gather to read the story of the Exodus, remember to discuss your own family history stories of immigration.

Enjoy your family's traditional favorites - Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Mizrahi - and try to pick up some new ones.

Our tradition is to have Ashkenazi chicken soup with matzo balls, followed by chopped liver, but the main courses are always Persian rice dishes with various khoreshts (stews). This year, I'm making green dill rice, as well as white rice, and the stews will be beef with eggplant and tomato and chicken with peach halves. I've already made my traditional Persian Pesach treats of badam-sukhte (literally "burned almonds," but actually toasted almonds covered in caramelized sugar).

Yesterday, I prepared the first step of my Persian halek (what we call charoset) by grinding all the nuts (equal amounts of walnuts, almonds, hazelnuts, brazil nuts, pistachio nuts and cashews) with golden raisins and lots of medjool dates, and flavored it with sweet wine, wine vinegar, pomegranate paste (rob-e-anar), pepper, cinnamon, cardamom, ginger, nutmeg, sugar. The container is sealed in the frig and the flavors are mellowing and marinating. On Friday, I'll mix in all the fruits (apples, banana, orange and various dried fruits) and let it continue to improve until the seder. We make a big bowl as we eat it all week long on matzo, rolled in romaine lettuce leaves, or as a filling for matzo bakhlava.

Continue with the old traditions, and add in a new custom from time to time, such as the wonderfully joyful Persian "Dayenu," where seder attendees whip each other (in fun) with spring onions (scallions) - the long green part, please, not the white bulbs, and definitely not with leeks (unless you like bruises!).

The blog will be slow for the next few days as there's just too much to prepare.

Turning bytes into books

Relatives always ask when I'm going to write a book about the family. As do many other genealogists, I reply that it isn't a possibility yet; things keep changing, new information is always being discovered.

However, there may be a way to handle this. You may be in the same boat, wanting to produce a comprehensive volume of research and photographs, but wondering what to do about updates. There's some good news as there are ways to produce periodic updates to the big book as new family facts are uncovered. You could even prepare a book focusing simply on a roots trip to an ancestral shtetl. The possibilities are endless.

Although this New York Times story focuses on scrapbooking, the hints, tips and resources offered can easily be adapted by genealogists and family historians wishing to preserve their unique discoveries.

Resources include Blurb.com, Picaboo.com and Picturia Press.

Today, Ms. Leendertse still turns a pile of pictures and paragraphs into bound books, but instead of working just for a roster of major publishers like MIT Press, she helps individuals create books. She is participating in an offshoot of the scrapbooking phenomena, the hobby of collecting and preserving photos and mementos.

What was once a pastime for mothers recording family memories for their children has blossomed into a new, fertile marketplace of collaboration. People with stories to tell are creating personalized books filled with pictures, blog entries and even business proposals. While some of these glorified scrapbooks are aimed at the world at large, many new titles were never intended to be sold in stores or marketed in any way. For instance, architects submitting bound proposals for their projects have used some of the scrapbooking tools.

The digital tools — the camera, scanner and word processor — have opened the field of book creation to the amateur as the hobby moves away from pasting buttons and rickrack onto pages. But sometimes the bookmakers need a little help.....

Downloadable digital designs, templates and illustrations can be found at theshabbyshoppe.com, scrappydoodlekits.com, rakscraps.com, peppermintcreative.com and escrappers.com. Some have free samples, charge for more complex types, and some distribute free files for an annual subscription to archives.

Katie Pertiet, the creative director for DesignerDigitals.com, sells new downloadable artwork for scrapbookers from a Web site she runs with her husband from her home. Last year, she herself created five different books with more than 400 illustrated pages filled with photos and stories about her children and grandchildren.

Every Sunday morning she shares some of these designs with her customers. Some are produced by Ms. Pertiet and others by artists who license their art to the site. She estimates that she sells about 700 packages each Sunday.

The story also talks about software:

Book creators use Adobe Photoshop (about $650), but others find the simpler and less expensive Photoshop Elements (about $100) adequate. Some amateur bookmakers prefer focused scrapbooking software like Nova Development’s Art Explosion Scrapbook Factory (novadevelopment.com) selling for about $40. As the name might imply, the package comes with thousands of fonts, illustrations, templates and “photorealistic embellishments” like pictures of buttons, ribbons or charms.

What can a book cost? According to the story:

A 7- by-7-inch soft-cover book from Blurb.com starts at $13 for 20 to 40 pages, with extra pages additional. Bigger, fatter books like a 150-page 13-by-11-inch hardcover cost $85. There are volume discounts. Picaboo.com sells some 20-page soft-cover books for $10 and offers a variety of bound books including ones covered with linen or padded leather.

Read more here

JOWBR online burials exceed 1 million

The JewishGen Online Worldwide Burial Registry now includes more than one million records in 1,929 cemeteries worldwide.

Data, including gravestone photographs, has been donated by hundreds of individuals and groups. Translators have assisted by translating inscriptions providing that information.

In the past few months the following records were added, said JewishGen vice president Joyce Field: Belarus, 392; Canada, 15,993; Germany, 1,214; Hungary, 28; India, 104; Moldova, 3,410; Romania, 246; Ukraine, 968; and USA, 10,074. She noted that JOWBR's movers and shakers are Nolan Altman, Max Heffler, Michael Tobias and Warren Blatt.

Field adds,

As you travel this year and visit ancestral towns or towns in your
current country of residence, please consider recording data from the Jewish cemeteries and/or photographing all the tombstones in the cemetery or landsmanschaft plot for JOWBR.

The JOWBR links for information include

Search the database
Cemetery inventory
JOWBR instructions
Photograph guidelines
How to submit data
Donor agreement

Antwerp and the Red Star Line

Many of our immigrant ancestors traveled to America on the vessels of the Red Star Line, out of Antwerp, Belgium.

Artist Eugeen Van Mieghem (1875-1930) recorded many scenes at the port, and in fact Antwerp has a Van Mieghem Museum.

Joy Rich of New York informed me about two events in Philadelphia and New York where the program, "Eugeen Van Mieghem and the Emigrants of the Red Star Line," will be presented. Both are free and open to the public.

The Philadelphia program is set for noon, Wednesday, April 30, at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, while the New York program is at 6.30pm, Wednesday, May 7, at the Museum of the City of New York. For more information, contact van.mieghem.museum#skynet.be

An exhibit, "Antwerp=America=Red Star Line," is at the National Maritime Museum in Antwerp through December 28. Click here or here for more details.

For more information about the Red Star Line, click here.

From 1873-1935, the line brought nearly 3 million people from Antwerp to America and Canada. The Red Star Line buildings till exist in Antwerp on the Scheldt, from where their ships set off across the Atlantic. The old buildings will soon accommodate a historic heritage center museum being developed by the Antwerp Tourist Department and the Museum on the River.

Other website sections include history, why emigration, heritage center, ships, buildings and the museum.

Among the ships listed were several which brought my ancestors. Sara Talalai arrived from Mogilev in 1902 on the Vaderland; there were others on different ships.

A man of notes

"The day the music died," by David Brinn, in the Jerusalem Post, focuses on Feher Jewish Music Center's former director Dr. Yuval Shaked, whose 12 years at the center ended March 31.

He had single-handedly overseen, since 1999, the FHC's collection of thousands of recordings of Jewish music, from classical, religious and pop genres, to the computerized database. It was the music source for scholars, cantors, academics and musicians from around the world.

I've known him for years and understand his passionate dedication to the collection.

Each time I wrote an article for the Jerusalem Post on FHC resources and achievements, he was deluged with phone calls and emails from people wanting to volunteer, by new immigrants wanting to perform the music, and by people (in Israel and abroad) wishing to donate valuable collections to the archives. He spoke at several JFRA Israel genealogy society meetings and located music composed or recorded by several members' ancestors.

Over the years, we had discussed arranging a CD of Iranian Jewish music, and I'm sorry I didn't pursue it with more diligence. It would have been welcomed by the Diaspora Iranian Jewish community and funding could well have been located.

While visitors can still come and access the music data bank through listening stations, he says, in the story, that he made a calculation before he left - only about eight percent of the collection is accessible today in the data bank. "The rest is in my memory," he said.

On one memorable visit - I always went with a one-hour visit scheduled and stayed for several hours, discovering new materials - I sat on one side of his desk piled high with newly received materials waiting to be catalogued into the database. Flipping through the stacked high cases, a series of Ukrainian National Archives CDs caught my eye. Based on a famous ethnographic music expedition in the early 1900s which recorded on wax cylinders, the Archives had produced digitized CDs to preserve and transmit the rare collection.

One featured recordings made in Mogilev, Belarus (where my family lived from at least the early 1700s). I listened to recordings made by people my ancestors had perhaps heard - a famous cantor and others - it was as good as finding an archival document. It filled in the gaps and and helped me understand what life was like then. I am just one of thousands of people around the world who have used these and other resources.

According to the story:

"We've serviced people from all over," said Shaked. "We've gotten emails with queries of people who want information on their distant relative who was a ba'al tefila in a small village in Eastern Europe, things like that."

"We have numerous recordings that don't appear anywhere else, like 78 rpm recordings that were privately produced and ended up with us. We digitize them and archive them, write bios of forgotten cantors and singers, and find and attach photos if we can find them. Many times visitors have come, and have located a relative of theirs, whom they didn't believe that a recording of still existed," he added, with a clear passion in his voice for the subject matter.

Over the past few months, I've visited his office and we've often communicated by email. Each time, he voiced his worry at what would happen to the FHC after his departure, and how this would impact people worldwide who utilize it.

"By dismissing me, they're effectively closing the center," Shaked told The Jerusalem Post. "Everyone who's familiar with the collection knows it's unique in the world."

What is worse is that almost all recent funding for various initiatives of the Center came from Yuval's own prodigious fundraising efforts. But the museum's management did nothing to find funding for his position.

Museum director Hasia Israeli told The Jerusalem Post that the center is not being closed, but part of a "reorganization process."

"There are budget cuts we needed to face, and this was part of that decision," she said, adding that the center is going to continue digitalizing its data banks of music archives.

According to Shaked, however, unless there's someone in his position, that effort will never materialize.

Although the director said efforts were being made to find funding to bring Yuval back, he says the only efforts are coming from him. When he was terminated, there was no effort made to approach the Feher Foundation to find a solution, and even the museum's fundraiser was not asked to become involved.

"Even now, the efforts to find funds are not being undertaken by the management, but by the chief curator of the museum and by myself at home."

What is most important is that he has always maintained that the FHC could be self-sufficient if the museum would properly promote the CDs and concerts produced by the FHC.

"The center could cover all its expenses if the management would support these projects and transfer the funds. The center sells CDs, not only at the museum and on our site, but through Amazon. However, the money from Amazon, for instance, is transferred to the American Friends of Beth Hatefusoth, and the management in Israel has always refused to ask them to transfer the funds here. It's used to pay the salary of a secretary in their office instead," he said.

The recently released excellent double CD of Kamti LeHallel with the music of the Amsterdam, London and New York Spanish & Portuguese communities, received no museum promotion, according to Cantor Daniel Halfon.

Yuval maintains that the project was damaged by the museum's management, which gave it no recognition or attention. It wasn't even mentioned at a board meeting that took place two weeks after its release.

Shaked said in the story that the management's attitude has been ambivalent for a long time: "In my first meeting with the director in February 2006, she told me that she wasn't sure the museum should even have a music center - she preferred a data bank on Jewish kitchens."

The center was founded by musicologist Dr. Avner Bahat in 1982 and directed until 1999 by him, when Yuval became director after working with Bahat from 1996. The FHC has released 20 CDs and cassettes featuring traditional singing of Jews in Morocco, Egypt, Yemen, Bombay and Spain; music of vanished communities, and other types of music.

Read more here.

New York: 1832 cholera epidemic

Family historians are always interested in the lives of their ancestors, and for those whose families lived in New York in the early 19th century, today's story in the New York Times will explain what life was like in the face of a cholera epidemic.

"How Epidemics Helped Shape the Modern Metropolis," focused on an 1832 cholera epidemic, in connection with a New York Historical Society exhibit.

Cholera appeared in South Asia in 1817, spread to other seaports and to London in 1831, reaching New York the next year.

On a Sunday in July 1832, a fearful and somber crowd of New Yorkers gathered in City Hall Park for more bad news. The epidemic of cholera, cause unknown and prognosis dire, had reached its peak.

People of means were escaping to the country. The New York Evening Post reported, “The roads, in all directions, were lined with well-filled stagecoaches, livery coaches, private vehicles and equestrians, all panic-struck, fleeing the city, as we may suppose the inhabitants of Pompeii fled when the red lava showered down upon their houses.”

An assistant to the painter Asher B. Durand described the scene near the center of the outbreak. “There is no business doing here if I except that done by Cholera, Doctors, Undertakers, Coffinmakers, &c,” he wrote. “Our bustling city now wears a most gloomy & desolate aspect — one may take a walk up & down Broadway & scarce meet a soul.”

The epidemic left 3,515 dead out of a population of 250,000. (The equivalent death toll in today’s city of eight million would exceed 100,000.) The dreadful time is recalled in art, maps, death tallies and other artifacts in an exhibition, “Plague in Gotham! Cholera in Nineteenth-Century New York,” at the New-York Historical Society. The show will run through June 28.

The story addresses life in crowded cities when sanitation and medical science were not prepared to deal with germs. The disease hit hardest, as these things usually do, in the poorest neighborhoods, such as Five Points. The story details the words of those who lived through the epidemic, through letters written (and included in the exhibition).

It took until 1854 for a British doctor, John Snow, to connect contaminated water with cholera, but not until 1883 was the disease-causing bacterium discovered.

As if predicting future shows like CSI, Snow plotted cholera cases on a Soho map, showing that most victims got their water from one public pump. The story mentions "Ghost Map," a reent book by Steven Johnson, which tells of the discovery that a baby's infected diapers were thrown into a cesspool near the pump.

Snow's research applied mapping in investigations - now computers analyze the data data - and medical historians credit him with the foundations of scientific epidemiology.

The epidemic forced cities to begin cleaning up but it was too late for the victims of the next bout in 1849. The population had doubled to 500,000 and cholera deaths numbered 5,071.

The story describes the growth of the city "as far north as 14th Street," and how residents sought clean air in the village of Greenwich, calling attention to small brick houses - still bearing their dates of construction today - built after 1832 in the Village.

In 1842, the Croton Aqueduct system brought in clean water and the 1866 founding of the Metropolitan Board of Health helped to regulate conditions.

Read more here .

Belarus: Gomel graves desecrated

If your family has roots in Gomel, Belarus, read this AP story about the desecration of an 18th century Jewish cemetery via the rebuilding of a sports stadium.

Before World War II, Belarus was home to some 1 million Jews; 800,000 died in the Holocaust. Today there are about 27,000 Jews in the country's 10 million citizens.

Jews began to settle in Gomel in the 16th century. By the late 19th century, they were more than half of the population. In 1903, according to the story, the Gomel Jews made history by being the first to resist a pogrom and defended 26 synagogues and prayer houses. Most of the city's 40,000 Jewish residents managed to get out before the Nazis arrived; 4,000 who stayed were murdered in November 1941. Today's population is 500,000 with only a few thousand Jews among them.

"It's impossible to pack an entire cemetery into sacks," said worker Mikhail Gubets, adding that he stopped counting the skulls when the number went over 100.

But critics say it's part of a pattern of callous indifference toward Belarus's Jewish heritage that was prevalent when the country was a Soviet republic and hasn't changed.

The stadium in Gomel, Belarus's second largest city and a center of Jewish life until World War II, is one of four that were built on top of Jewish cemeteries around the country.

The Gomel cemetery was destroyed when the stadium was built in 1961, but the remains lay largely undisturbed until this spring when reconstruction began and a bulldozer turned up the first bones.

A Jewish leader in Gomel, Vladimir Gershanok, says he asked the builders to put the bones into sacks for reburial at a cemetery that has a monument to Holocaust victims.

"We know we can't stop the construction but we're trying to minimize the destruction," Gershanok said.

But city authorities have ruled that the construction can go ahead because the bones are more than 50 years old.

A city official doesn't understand the problem. A history professor views the cemetery as part of the city's heritage and has filled three sacks with bones and saved two of the unearthed marble gravestones, while others are piled near a trash bin or carried away.

It's not only Gomel; Grodno had a similar problem; and Ukrainian Jewish graves have also been desecrated. Vinnitsa was able to stop construction of an apartment building on a cemetery earlier this month and the Ukrainian authorities apologized, but Belarus, according to Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Israel, has been one of the least responsive on Jewish issues.

There's more in the story.

DNATraits: Jewish genetic panel price break

During April, as Jews around the world gather for the Passover holiday, DNATraits is offering a major price break for the most comprehensive testing panel available for the Ashkenazi-descent Jewish population.

The special April price for the panel of 25 Jewish genetic conditions is $199, complete with genetic counseling review, instead of $299. Both prices contrast with fees at other testing companies (direct-to-consumer and universities) which charge $600-$1,500 for panels of only 6-11 diseases. DNATraits hopes this unprecedented move will change genetic testing industry standards.

“We believe that knowledge is power. The knowledge of being a carrier can ensure that the necessary steps are taken to prevent a disease from being transmitted to the next generation. Since Tay Sachs testing began in the Jewish community, the incidence of Tay Sachs in Jewish babies has dropped 90 percent.

The same can happen for the other diseases in this panel, all it takes is knowing whether you are a carrier for one of these diseases included in the Ashkenazi Panel,” said DNATraits founding partner Bennett Greenspan.

The bottom line is that for a mere $8 per disease, one can learn if s/he is a carrier for a large number of serious Jewish genetic diseases in the Ashkenazi community. If a parent or grandparent tests positive, there is urgency in having younger children test. If the Jewish community tested for these conditions prior to marriage - as is done for Tay Sachs in the Orthodox community - the incidence could be lessened.

Some individuals have asked why the breast cancer gene is not included in this panel. Greenspan explained that BRCA1 and BRCA2 are patented by Myriad Genomics, and no one can test for them unless a patent royalty system is first worked out. He said that Myriad charges $450 for three variants of BRAC2 while DNATraits now charges $199 for 25 other Jewish inherited diseases (and many variants). "If they weren't patented in the US, we would offer them," he said. "We will probably offer them in Europe where the US patent isn't applicable (the European Union tossed out the patent a few years ago."

Tracing the Tribe readers will remember that I wrote about Dr. Doron Behar's announcement of the founding of DNATraits at a meeting of the JFRA Israel genealogy society in this blog posting (the Jerusalem Post articles links were still live today). Since that posting, the Ashkenazi panel price has been reduced to encourage testing within the Jewish community.

For more information, click here.

Here's the press release from DNATraits:

DNATraits Launches Most Comprehensive Ashkenazi Inherited Diseases Panel at Unprecedented Low Price

HOUSTON – In an unprecedented move that will change standards in the genetic testing industry, DNATraits launched today the most comprehensive panel of tests for the Jewish population of Ashkenazi descent.

The panel includes tests for 25 diseases and will be offered at an introductory price of $199 during the month of April. After April, the regular price for this panel from DNATraits will be $299, still substantially below other offerings: other direct-to-consumer companies and university hospitals offer to test six to eleven diseases at prices ranging from $600 to $1500,

DNATraits utilizes a simple at-home saliva kit to collect personal DNA samples and provides results, complete with genetic counseling review, in four to six weeks.

“We believe that knowledge is power. The knowledge of being a carrier can ensure that the necessary steps are taken to prevent a disease from being transmitted to the next generation.

Since Tay Sachs testing began in the Jewish community, the incidence of Tay Sachs in Jewish babies has dropped 90 percent. The same can happen for the other diseases in this panel, all it takes is knowing whether you are a carrier for one of these diseases included in the Ashkenazi Panel,” said DNATraits founding partner Bennett Greenspan.

With years of experience in genotyping for large corporations and delivery of DNA-related information to hundreds of thousands of customers, other partners in the venture include Phil Robinson, co-founder of Kbiosciences in the UK, Doron Behar, MD, PhD at the Rambam Medical Center, Haifa, Israel, and Max Blankfeld, managing partner of Family Tree DNA.

DNATraits offers the least expensive medically validated tests in the world accompanied by free genetic counseling to ensure clients receive accurate and understandable results. DNATraits’ approach meets the guidelines set forth by the HIPPA and the policy statement issued by the American College of Medical Genetics.

Information about the Ashkenazi Panel can be found at site www.dnatraits.com/ashkenazi. The Web site also provides tutorials, service descriptions, and listings of medically validated tests available to consumers. Cystic Fibrosis and Tay-Sachs are among the well-known inherited disorders available for testing, but Greenspan said his team of physicians and scientists are constantly culling the latest medical research to identify new verifiable markers for inherited genetic disorders.

For additional information, please contact Max Blankfeld –max@dnatraits.com or call (713)868-1438

Yiddish: 2008 Summer programs

Did your parents and grandparents converse in a secret language when discussing things they didn't want the children to understand? If your family roots are in Eastern Europe, it was likely Yiddish.

My parents and grandparents did the same to us. However, after I learned Farsi, my husband and I spoke it together when we didn't want relatives to know what we were saying. They really didn't like that at all!

I'm sorry that the younger generations "lost" Yiddish. I took a class ages ago at NYU, didn't keep up with it and have regretted it since I became involved in genealogy. If you feel that now's the time to make the language connection to your ancestors, there are year-round Yiddish classes in many places, as well as international summer programs offering intensive training.

Here are a few of the summer programs. They vary in length and price; click on them to learn more.

Uriel Weinreich Program in Yiddish Language, Literature & Culture
June 30-August 8, 2008 - NYU Manhattan Campus, New York City

Daily intensive language course, four levels, develop proficiency in speaking, reading, writing an cultural literacy. Required afternoon conversation classes and lecture series. Resources: NYU's Skirball Department of Hebrew & Judaic Studies, the largest North American university program in Jewish studies. YIVO is at the nearby Center for Jewish History, with an extensive library and archives - one of the world's major collections.

Heritage Tour with the Vilnius Yiddish Institute
June 22-July 2, 2008 - Tour of Eastern Europe

A unique travel experience, to see Litvak Jewish life - its profoundly rich past, its vibrant present and its challenging future. Meet with historians, linguists and folklorists at the Institute. Travel to Riga and Kaunas, shtetls and more. The 10-day tour includes expert speakers and intimate, in-depth meetings and discussion with members of the Lithuanian and Latvian Jewish communities and prominent governmental leaders.

Vilnius Yiddish Institute: Yiddish Language & Literature
July 27-August 22, 2008 - Vilnius, Lithuania

Four levels (total beginners to advanced) plus a rich cultural program of lectures, tours and music. Includes local/international cultural experts; performances, film, musical events; performances, film and musical events; international specialists, survivors and scholars; local and Jewish history seminars; tours. The Vilnius Yiddish Institute is the preeminent Eastern European center for Yiddish scholarship, conducting continuing original research on language and culture, and year-round/summer university level instruction.

2nd Birobidzhan International Summer Yiddish Program
August 19-September 7, 2008 - Birobidzhan, Jewish Autonomous Region, Russia and Harbin Jewish Heritage Seminar

International summer program of Yiddish language and culture in Birobidzhan, the capital of the Jewish Autonomous Region in the Russian Far East, with participation of Yiddish-studies lecturers from international universities. Since 1934, it has been the only place in the world where Yiddish was the official state language. Academic scholars from the nearby Chinese city of Harbin will join the program this year. In the early 20th century, Harbin was home to a large Russian, Yiddish and English-speaking Jewish community. Visit Khabarovsk, and the final days of the program are focused on Jewish Harbin, and interested participants will have a chance to travel there.

The successful summer Yiddish program at Tel Aviv University has been cancelled for 2008 as academic classes will continue into July following a prolonged nationwide faculty strike; it will return in 2009.

Yiddish at LA Times book festival

Looking for something to do in Southern California? If you love books, you'll love the LA Times Festival of Books, set for April 26-27 on the UCLA campus.

The event, billed as the country's largest celebration of the written word, anticipates 140,000 attendees, 450+ authors, 300+ exhibitors, 900+ volunteers, 100+ author panels, six outdoor stages and two children’s areas. Hours are 10am-6pm Saturday, 10am-5pm Sunday; admission is free, parking is $8.

Yiddishkayt LA has announced that it will return for its second year.

Yiddishkayt's Booth 603 will have "an amazing assortment of books covering the rich world of Yiddish. We're bringing books in Yiddish, books about Yiddish, and books for kinderlekh, for kids. Fill your shelves at home with plays, novels, history and humor from the best Yiddish book store in L.A. (well, at least in April)!"

They are also looking for volunteers for the event. Interested readers may email events@yiddishkaytla.org.

Identifying genealogy scams

Ancestry.com's blog recently warned against potentially fraudulent sites posing as genealogy websites.

It was posted by Ancestry.com's public relations director Mike Ward.

We have recently become aware of three websites purporting to allow family history research: SearchYourGenealogy.com, Ancestry-search.com and Australian-Ancestry.com. The sites claim to have “the largest online genealogical search tool” and promote themselves as the foremost resources for genealogy, but from what we can tell, these sites are nothing more than a series of web pages with links to other services. These sites, in our opinion, are clearly fraudulent.

On each site, potential customers are lured to purchase under what we feel to be false, misleading and deceitful promotional material, and get little or no value out of money spent at the websites. Blog and message board posts from the community confirm this opinion.

The people/companies behind the websites are buying very high level paid search results on Google and other sites. In addition, they are using trademarks of well-known websites, including Ancestry.com and Genealogy.com, to get higher-than-normal natural search results. It appears the site colors, fonts, and pictures on at least one site are designed to mislead people into believing the site is related to Ancestry.com.

As the leading online family history company, The Generations Network, Inc. and its website properties including Ancestry.com and its global network of Ancestry sites, Genealogy.com, and Rootsweb, we want to encourage consumers to validate and verify the legitimacy of a website before providing credit card information or paying for services. TGN will take appropriate administrative and legal action to do its part to protect the community from these sites.

About.com: Genealogy's Kimberly Powell's blog posting commented and added information:

....On a related note, there are also other Web sites on the net which make money in similar ways. Another series of genealogy sites that I've run into appear to be run by a company that calls itself Software Doctor, Inc. These include a host of sites such as birthrecords.ws, pennsylvania-records.com, freerecordsregistry.com, family-genealogy-search.com, etc. You can see an example of their affiliate program in this 2007 newsletter posted at softwaredoctor.com, but what I find intriguing is that the primary softwaredoctor.com URL now redirects to Google...

So how do you protect yourself from scams such as these. Unfortunately, many of these sites pay for high placement in search results on Google and other sites. Many also appear as "sponsored links" on reputable Web sites that support Google advertising, including Ancestry.com and even this site. This makes it appear the fraudulent site is being endorsed by the Web site on which it appears, although that is generally not the case. Therefore, before you provide anyone with credit card details or payment, check out the site and its claims to see what you can learn. There are a number of things you can do to identify and protect yourself from genealogy scams.

She offers an additional posting listing steps to identify such sites and protect yourself. Click the link for information on the following: What are you getting for your money? Look for contact information. Challenge search results. Look for repeated terms on the main page. Free isn't always free. Check out consumer complaint sites. Send them a question. Consult with others.

Masschusetts: Jewish history of Lawrence

A flurry of recent articles have focused on the Jewish history of various US towns, in connection with local historical societies and museum exhibits. Family historians, who may now live far from their family' roots, find such stories helpful as they look for additional information.

This one is about Lawrence, Massachusetts, with the local Hadassah chapter taking the lead.

The organization says that although the community is declining, it is important to remember the Jewish history. A Hadassah leader said "This is for those who will come after us, so they know what their roots are. There will always be young people who are wondering what the city was like and they should know what our forefathers did."

LAWRENCE — Jewish roots run deep in Lawrence.

Beginning in the 1870s, many Jewish families arrived in the city from Russia and Poland, soon becoming successful business owners and establishing synagogues and organizations.

Members of the Merrimack Valley chapter of Hadassah want to keep that history alive. The theme of the group's meeting tomorrow is "Rediscovering Our Roots in Lawrence."

"There's a whole rich history in Lawrence that people don't know about," said Sherry Comerchero, coordinator of the Merrimack Valley Jewish Coalition for Literacy. ...

At a brunch, Louise Sandberg, director of the Lawrence Public Library special collections department, highlighted the history of Jews who settled in Greater Lawrence, Haverhill and Lowell.

Jews first settled in the Common, Valley, Concord and Lowell street area and, in the 1920s, began moving to the Tower Hill section.

Congregation Ansha Sholum is the only synagogue in the city and one of New England's oldest. Originally on Lowell Street, both Temple Emanuel and Congregation Tifereth Israel have moved to Andover. The community also built a Jewish Community Center.

Jewish merchants owned dry goods and retail shops including fine men's clothing stores. Two were Kaps (opened in 1902) and Sandlers, both owned by Lithuanian Jews.

The Hadassah chapter, formed in Lawrence in 1925, has 600 members and recently merged with the Haverhill chapter.

Read the complete story for more information.

Ethiopia: Jewish history

Haaretz's story about the Ethiopian Jews, "Digging deeper in Ethiopia," by Anshel Pfeffer, is generally refuted and debated in The Ethiopian Review blog posting, "The Ethiopian Jewish history is not a 'Romeo and Juliet'."

The Haaretz story begins:

Digging deeper in Ethiopian

ADDIS ABABA - In the old Falasha village of Ambober, 15 kilometers outside Gondar, there are only Christians living today. All the village's original inhabitants left for Israel at least 17 years ago. The old ORT school which used to serve the Jewish community is now a government school. Opposite is the compound of the local synagogue.

In the Beita Israel custom, there are two separate buildings, and while the women's synagogue is still the original tuckul, made from lathe walls of mud and wood, someone has made a donation and redone the men's synagogue as a sturdy, stone-walled building. No one prays there but it is one of the main stops on the routes of Jewish and Israeli groups who tour the Gonder region.

Inside, there is a wooden bookcase that contains the siddurim (prayer books) and Hebrew books that served the community decades ago. They all bear the stamp of the religious services department of the World Zionist Organization. Among the dusty and time-eaten prayer books, bibles and Hebrew primers, I found one slim tome that seemed a bit out of place. It was a treatise on the laws of shehita printed by the famous "Brothers and Widow Rohm" Printers of Vilnius, in 1896.

The incongruity of finding such a title in a Falasha village, a community with its own distinct laws of ritual slaughter, so different from those practiced by Orthodox Jews in late 19th Century, is incredible. The owners' scrawl inside the cover leaves little doubt this book used to reside in the private library of a religious Jew somewhere in Eastern Europe before the Second World War. How did it find its way to the Horn of Africa? ...........

The Ethiopian Review posting begins:

The Ethiopian Jewish history is not a 'Romeo and Juliet'

The Ethiopian Jewish history is not a romantic history like the history of Romeo and Juliet; it is a religious history – a divine message, a revelation from the Almighty God, who purposely brought these children of God from his earthly city – Jerusalem – to Ethiopia almost thousands years ago.

The Ethiopian Jewish history is a well known fact that one does not have to dig deeper to find out the validity of this glorious Ethiopian Jewish history. The history of Ethiopia is the history of the Ethiopian Jewish people. If someone wants to know more about the reality of the Ethiopian Jewish history, one must read the Ethiopian prayer books among many others; one cannot read these prayer books without coming across, many times, these sweet words: “Amlake-Israel” (the God of Israel); also, one should read especially “saatat” the hourly or nightly prayer of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, and one can see how many times “the God of Israel” has been mentioned there.

The writer of the article — Digging deeper in Ethiopia for the Jewish story — was dumbfounded when he descried among the “dirty and time-eaten prayer books” a collection of shehita whom he thought that someone had unknowingly “checked in the shehita book” and shipped it to Ethiopia. Could the same thing also be said about the Ark of the Covenant that when King Solomon ordered thousands of Jews to accompany his first Son, Menelik I, to Ethiopia, some of these Jews who were in a hurry because the King’s order was urgent, unknowingly chucked in the Ark of the Covenant and brought it with them to Ethiopia? It is possible it could have happened this way instead of saying that they had stolen the Ark. ........

Read the complete articles (links above).

Chicago: Sephardic Model Seder, Sephardic concert

The fifth annual Sephardic Model Seder, led by the famous Greek-born tenor Cantor Alberto Mizrahi of Anshe Emet Synagogue, took place recently. The event is held every year by the Alliance for Jews and Latinos,

Today Ladino is a dying language spoken by less than 200,000 mostly Sephardic Jews. But in Chicago, Ladino is helping Latinos and Jews find common ground. The Sephardic Model Seder, a special Passover celebration, is held every year by the Alliance for Jews and Latinos, a group that aims to return to the common denominator of their distant pasts, says Bonnie Rubinow, member of the Alliance Board.

The story offers quotes from the cantor and participants.

MIZRAHI: one of the things I like to do, is when we recount, there’s a word in Hebrew it´s called dayenu, in Sephardic or Ladino, it's called Abastaba a nos, it would have been enough for us, it would have sufficed us. Look at all the great things at the end it says had He taken us out of Egypt, it would have sufficed us…but if we had received the Torah…it would still have sufficed us, it gets greater and greater, all the things Gods did for us to take us out of Egypt….
Latinos who attend the Seder appreciate the telling of the freedom story of the Jewish people in a language that appears to be a distant cousin of the Spanish language, and it also reminds them of other freedom stories, says Olga Rojas.

Read about the sold-out event and listen to the interview and sound clips of Mizrahi here.

The Alliance is also co-sponsoring a Sephardic Legacy concert at the Instituto Cervantes in Chicago, at 12.30pm, Friday, April 18, with Barcelona-born composer/pianist Manuel García Morante and soprano Yrene Martínez-Roca.

For more details, click here or here.

San Francisco: StoryCorps at Jewish Museum

Door-to-Door is the mobile division of StoryCorps, and it will visit the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco through a program of the Bay Area JCC's Cultural Collaboration, from 9am-5pm, Tuesday, April 22.

StoryCorps records conversations between two people who are important to each other, archiving them for posterity at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. Take part in this revolutionary project by nominating an older relative or loved one.

Additionally, StoryCorps will be at the Contemporary Jewish Museum for a year from October 12, so visitors can record personal stories in a recording and listening "outpost" in the first floor gallery. Participants take home a copy, while another is given to the LOC.

To nominate a loved one to participate or for more information, click here.

Bnai Menashe: Jewish roots

The Bnei Menashe of India are discussed in this Haaretz article

In the 1940s, Dr. Hofalam Miluy Lantang was a young Indian doctor treating the Kuki-Chin-Mizo tribe that lives in north-eastern India. In his travels among the tribe's villages, he heard songs and saw traditions that sparked his curiosity and he decided to document them, without realizing their significance.

Only in 1999, more than 50 years later, in a meeting with Hillel Halkin, a writer and Israeli journalist researching the connection between the tribe's members and the Jewish people, did he discover that the traditions he recorded do indeed link the tribe to the Jews. These are the same traditions that prompted some tribe members to define themselves as Bnei Menashe, some 800 of whom have already immigrated to Israel, while thousands more are waiting to follow their example.

Lantang, now 88, was interviewed during his visit to Israel last week. He was afraid the customs would disappear so he began recording them. He says the customs have all disappeared and that his documentation is the only proof.

Customs include:

Repetition of words Manamasi (Menashe) in many of the tribe's songs, especially describing their travel across Asia. The group's "Song of the Sea" is a description reminiscent of the Exodus:

"When there was a king, the Red Sea dried up/in the afternoon we were guided by a cloud and at night by fire/during the day we fought many enemies/but those enemies were swallowed up by the Red Sea/and for those same people there is water that came forth from the rock."

Their Festival of Rice Bread resembles Passover. All year the tribe ate bread from rice with yeast. Once a year (May-June) during a three-day holiday, they ate rice bread without yeast.

In relation to circumcision, the Kuki tribe do not follow this tradition. However, an infant born without a foreskin is referred to as having "a sex organ of the old style," a reference to the fact that this tradition was followed in the past.

Hillel Halkin, author of "Across the Sabbath River: In Search of a Lost Tribe of Israel," describes the Bnei Menashe's journeys, and Lantang's role. Although some researchers say the tribe learned similar Jewish customs from Christian missionaries or from the New Testament, Halkin says Lantang's work showed the traditions existed long before as he recorded songs transmitted through the generations long before the missionaries arrived.

Some 800 of the Bnei Menashe have already immigrated to Israel. Some reports indicate another 7,000 wish to immigrate as well.

Invasion of the Googlegängers

Do you know the term Googlegängers?

Individuals who have the same names are known as Google twins or Googlegängers. The American Dialect Society named it the most creative word last year, according to a story in the New York Times.

To learn more about multiple digital same-namers, why people look for them and the reasons they feel a connection to them, read the story.

Have you ever Googled your own name and if so, what have you discovered?

From time to time Sam Blackman, a pediatric oncologist in Philadelphia, checks up on people other than patients. Namely, other Sam Blackmans.

No stethoscope is needed to take the pulse of his namesakes, though — just a Google search. And while he has never met the men he refers to as Sam 2.0 and Sam 3.0, when one of those other Sam Blackmans posted a photograph of his wife on the Internet, Dr. Blackman, 39, couldn’t help but feel a twinge of pleasure.

“I’m like ‘Oh! Sam Blackman got married,’ ” he said. “I felt like I should send a card or check his registry on Amazon.”

The story mentions how a writer named Angela Shelton met 40 others of the same name. There are a few websites for name-tallys. One group is for people named Ritz and their logo is a cracker box

(NOTE: a Ritz cracker, for those who don't get the reference, is a small round orange-yellow cracker that tastes really good with a dab of peanut butter or even used to scoop up tuna salad. It is a US product, but may be found occasionally in international supermarkets)

The writer also asks why so many people feel a connection with strangers because they share a name?

Social science, it turns out, has an answer. It is because human beings are unconsciously drawn to people and things that remind us of ourselves.

A psychological theory called the name-letter effect maintains that people like the letters in their own names (particularly their initials) better than other letters of the alphabet.

And in a strange six-year study with online phone directors, SSDI records and experiments, a social psychologist and his team discovered that "Johnsons are more likely to wed Johnsons, women named Virginia are more likely to live in (and move to) Virginia, and people whose surname is Lane tend to have addresses that include the word 'lane,' not 'street.'"

The psychologist says this is called "implicit egotism;" people feel an affinity to people, places and things that resemble their own names. And, says another researcher, “When someone is similar to you, you give them special privileges.”

Read the complete story here.

Read the story comments also. Some writers tell parents to get their children yourname.com or firstname@lastname.com domains when their kids are born, and advise them to choose another name for the child if the domain isn't available Another mentions Alan Berliner's film "The Sweetest Sound;" he tracked down all the Alan Berliners he could find and invited them over. Some readers reported that they already own their name's domain name, gmail account, AOL IM screen name, myspace and Facebook URLs, and more.

I am the only one with my name. What about you?

San Diego: Non-Traditional Families, April 13

How should genealogists handle sensitive data and issues discovered in their research? What are the implications of including, or excluding, information in your family tree?

How does your decision effect those who come after you seeking genealogical information? What are the medical, ethical and halachic implications of these decisions regarding adoption, assisted reproduction and genetic disorders?

To help answer these important questions, the San Diego Jewish Genealogy Society has a program that should be of great interest to all genealogists - Jewish or not - at its next meeting, at 1pm, Sunday, April 13, at the Lawrence Family JCC in La Jolla (members, free; others $3).

Stephanie Weiner will present "Non-Traditional Families: Issues of Privacy and Confidentiality in Constructing A Genealogical Tree."

She will present ways to deal with sensitive data and issues when non-traditional families are involved. What are the halachic, medical and ethical implications of decisions to include or exclude material such as those regarding adoption and assisted reproduction? With more genetic disorders being identified, and donor sperm conceptions, the issues will become more pertinent.

What are the implications of including, or excluding, information in your family tree? How does your decision effect those who come after you seeking genealogical information?

As an adoptee, Stephanie has an abiding interest in access to vital records. She has worked with grassroots adoption organizations and has presented on the topic of adoption, orphans, and non-traditional families. Her most recent project has been the preparation of an online teaching module about adoption for the Jewish Education Council of Seattle.

A semi-retired librarian working part-time for the San Diego County Library system, she was a college and university librarian. Stephanie has been a speaker, since 2003, at IAJGS (International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies) annual conferences and has provided training in online genealogy for staff members and the general public. A featured speaker on genealogy for several San Diego County libraries, she has also presented at the Jewish Genealogical Society of Greater Washington (Seattle).

She is a member of the IAJGS Public Records Access and Monitoring Committee, the Genealogical Speakers Guild and the Association of Professional Genealogists.

For more information, click here.

New books with a Jewish genealogy twist

All holidays are family history times, as generations gather from near and far.

Passover is nearly here so we'll have extra time to catch up with our reading during the holiday. Not. That was a joke of sorts. Who has any time to do anything until after the holiday is over? I don't. But put these two books on your list for AP, as we call it, After Pesach.

There's a story here on a Brooklyn bookshop - BookCourt - owned by Henry Zook and Mary Gannett who started the shop in 1981. Today, they run it with their son, Zack Zook, 23.

I'm very curious about the Zook name and just wrote to them. I'll let you know what I find out. In any case, they have a nice website and also send out "These just in" alerts.

The latest list included two new paperback editions that should interest Tracing the Tribe readers because of the characters, backgrounds and historical periods. The books are "Landsman: A Novel," by Peter Charles Melman and "The Ministry of Special Cases," by Nathan Englander.

"Landsman: A Novel," by Peter Charles Melman

... a boisterous, sometimes brutal, and full-hearted tale of a Jewish hoodlum turned Confederate soldier in the Civil War. Elias Abrams is the son of an indentured servant in New Orleans who escapes a robbery gone awry–and the wrath of his old underworld gang, the Cypress Stump Boys–by enlisting in the Third Louisiana Regiment ...

Here's a snippet of an interview with the author:

Melman: ...And yet, there I am a couple years ago, working at a small bookstore in Brooklyn, when I come across a line in Tony Horwitz's Confederates in the Attic claiming that several thousand Jews fought for the South during the Civil War. I was absolutely thunderstruck; the idea of a Jewish Confederacy had simply never occurred to me. As a Jew born in New York but raised in Louisiana, with an undergraduate degree in history and doctorate in English-Creative Writing,...

Learn more about Melman's research at the book's website for resources on the Jews of that time and place, an interactive map and more. Definitely worth checking out if you are interested in New Orleans, have ancestors from there (Ashkenazi or Sephardi) or want to know more about the Civil War.

A Brooklyn resident, Melman has an interesting background: "Born along Long Island’s north shore in 1971, Peter Charles Melman moved with his family to Louisiana at the age of twelve, where he learned to hunt woodcock, skin catfish, dip tobacco, and in so doing, thoroughly offend the more nebbish-y tendencies of his cousins back up in New York." He also used to work at the BookCourt, so this is kind of full-circle for him.

"The Ministry of Special Cases," by Nathan Englander

From its unforgettable opening scene in the darkness of a forgotten cemetery in Buenos Aires, Nathan Englander’s debut novel "The Ministry of Special Cases" casts a powerful spell. In the heart of Argentina’s Dirty War, Kaddish Poznan struggles with a son who won’t accept him; strives for a wife who forever saves him; and spends his nights protecting the good name of a community that denies his existence. When the nightmare of the disappeared children brings the Poznan family to its knees, they are thrust into the unyielding corridors of the Ministry of Special Cases, a terrifying, byzantine refuge of last resort...

There's more on the book at the National Yiddish Book Center, and a bit from the LA Times review:

How to honor the dead, if there's no way to prove they are in fact dead? The question drives Kaddish to distraction and "The Ministry of Special Cases" to its macabre end. As suggested by the current wave of trials in Argentina, this impossible question lingers for thousands of Argentine fathers and mothers and grandparents, most famously the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who have gathered in protest every Thursday in Buenos Aires for decades.

Enjoy!

Inventing relatives for fun and profit

What would I do without Chris Dunham of The Genealogue? When I'm overwhelmed with work, a visit to his blog is always a relief.

He's at it again, with his newest post and links. Thanks, Chris, for this one.

How to Invent a Relative

Genealogical research can be really, really hard, but I've found a way to make it easy and fun. The trick is to create your relatives from scratch.

Give him a name — To avoid suspicion, don't use silly made-up names like "Kiefer" or "Barack."

Grab a picture of somebody else and make it look old — "Hey, my great-grandfather looked like Jack Nicholson!"

Borrow some good anecdotes — "Remember the time he shared a hot tub with Kissinger?"

Write fake news items about him — A couple of wedding announcements, an article on his DUI arrest and an obituary will put flesh on his artificial bones.

Give him a proper burial — You don't want this guy showing up at reunions, so make sure he's good and dead!

Each "suggestion" is linked to a story, but you'll have to go to his blog for the complete picture.

Boston: Jewish Mosaic exhibit

How did our ancient ancestors live? What was Jewish society like in the ancient Diaspora? Genealogists and family historians are always curious about the lives of our ancestors. Events and exhibits that help put things into perspective and context are always interesting.

Centered on an ancient synagogue's mosaic floor in Tunisia, a Boston exhibit presents contemporary jewelry, coins, marble statues, ritual objects and textiles to help visitors to see the role of synagogues and understand Jewish society in the ancient world.

"Tree of Paradise: Jewish Mosaics from the Roman Empire," is an exhibit running through June 8 at the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College, organized by the Brooklyn Museum.

It includes the reconstruction of an ancient mosaic floor from a synagogue in Hammam Lif, Tunisia (the ancient town of Naro, later called Aquae Persianae by the Romans).

The mosaics, along with contemporary jewelry, coins, marble statues, ritual objects, and textiles from the Brooklyn Museum’s collection shed light on the role of synagogues in the Diaspora during Late Antiquity, the development of Jewish art in the Roman period, the importance of female patrons in the ancient Jewish community, connections among early Christian, Jewish, and Pagan symbolism in this period, and the relationship between ancient and modern understanding of the synagogue as an institution.

The works of art in the exhibition reveal a society where Jews were more integrated and accepted than ancient texts would suggest.

For more information, click here.

New York: Jewish Weddings, April 13

Is there anything more Jewish than a Jewish wedding?

No matter what community the bride and groom are from, the basics remain the same and the event has always been central to Jewish life throughout the ages.

Today, there's a whole lot of tweaking going on, from menus to videos. Jewish weddings are central to genealogists and family historians as they investigate this very social life cycle event.

A conference on "Objects of Affection: The Wedding in Jewish Life" will take place from 10am-9pm Sunday, April 13, at the Center for Jewish History in New York City, presented by the CJH and The Working Group on Jews, Media & Religion at The Center for Religion & Media (New York University).

Weddings are the most elaborately celebrated of Jewish life-cycle events. This is reflected in a wide array of customs (rituals, songs, dances), objects (canopies, rings, clothing) professions (entertainers, caterers, photographers), and works of cultural creativity (representations of weddings in plays, films, visual art). Some of these phenomena are centuries old and widely familiar; others are rare, highly localized, or very recent innovations.

Consequently, weddings provide abundant opportunities for considering the intersection of media and religiosity in Jewish life. We have invited today’s gathering of scholars, artists, and performers to select key examples of mediating the Jewish wedding - from its graphic representation in a medieval manuscript to avant-garde performance - and to discuss what their place in a rite that is central to Jewish communality and continuity reveal about Jewish life itself.

How do all these media practices enhance this ritual - or serve as opportunities for critique? What other aspects of Jewish life - gender, family, religious authority, economic concerns, aesthetic desires - do these wedding practices engage? How do the various media involved help articulate notions of spirituality, sexuality, memory, and religious tradition or provide a means for transformation?

Among the 14 programs:

• Marriage Procession, Italy, 1465: “The way we were” Realia or fantasia?
• Weddings in S. Ansky’s "The Dybbuk"
• Four Weddings and a Funeral: Cartoons of weddings from the Yiddish press
• Benya Krik (1927): How it was done in the USSR
• Fiddler on the Roof: Sunflowers, bottle dancers and the invention of tradition
• Wedding videos: Performing ritual for the camera
• “Yidden” on YouTube: The mediation of Mordechai Ben David’s music and wedding dance moves
• Wedding Menus: Nagamaki on the smorgasbord
• Jewish Wedding Booklets: Tweaking tradition fr personal meaning

"Goodbye, Columbus" (1969) will be screened in the evening.

For more information on the speakers and programs or registration, click here and here.

Oregon: Jewish in Japan, April 15

What kind of records are available concerning Jews who lived in Japan? Are there census record? Are these available to genealogists? What happened to Jewish aliens living in Japan during the Second World War?

If these questions are intriguing, then the next program of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Oregon will be of interest.

George Sidline will present "Somehow We'll Survive: A Story of Growing Up Jewish in WWII-era Japan," beginning at 7pm, Tuesday, April 15, at Ahavath Achim Synagogue in Portland.

Sidline, the second of two sons, was born in Japan of Jewish parents before World War II. When war broke out, the family remained in Kobe, Japan, where George's father ran an import/export business. After the war, the family stayed in Japan, eventually immigrating to Canada in 1954. In 1962, George moved to the US, where he worked in California's Silicon Valley.

Many people urged George to write a book about his wartime experiences and the experiences of others among the foreign population living in Japan during the war. He published his book in 2007, chronicling some of the harrowing events that engulfed the family.

The book is available at www.amazon.com, titled "Somehow, We'll Survive, Life in Japan during WWII through the eyes of a young Caucasian boy." A retired engineer, George lives with his wife in Portland, Oregon, where his children and grandchildren reside.

For more details and directions, click here.

Chicago 2008: Chicago, Midwest program details

Chicago and Midwest Jewish genealogy research will be one focus of programming at the 28th IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy (Chicago, August 17-22).

If you are searching ancestors who lived in the area, these programs will provide information on many sources:

• The Musical 'Chicago' and All That Genealogical Jazz: Ron Arons and Mike Karsen collected standard genealogical documents to piece together the lives of two women and related them to Chicago history.
• Resources for Jewish Genealogy in Chicagoland: Mike Karsen will highlight major sources for tracing Jewish roots in Chicago, including key cemeteries, vital records, census records and immigration records, newspapers and synagogue records.
• Q&A Breakfast on Chicago Research Resources: Mike Karsen will answer questions.
• Clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois Genealogical Records: Phillip Costello will demonstrate how filed pleadings, judges orders and naturalization, divorce, or probate case files provide unintended secondary value to historians and genealogists.
• Polished Gems: Property Records Cook County, Illinois: Jeanne Larzalere Bloom, CG(SM) discusses real estate records held by the Cook County Recorder's Office.
• But ... It's Not Where It Is Supposed to Be! Unpolished Gems: Jeanne Larzalere Bloom, CG(SM) highlights additional records, such as Affidavits (Dates of Death Marriages and Marital Status; Kinship and Family Relationships); Petitions (Change of Surnames); Certificates (Naturalization); Agreements; and Military Discharge Papers.
• How I Almost Didn't Find Doda Channa from Tshikago (Chicago?): Rony Golan tells the story of how he reunited his Holocaust survivor mother with her Chicago family.
• Genealogy Research in Indiana: Autumn Gonzalez and Diane Sharp. Genealogy librarians from the Indiana State Library will assist Resource Room visitors.
• Midwestern Resources for Jewish Genealogy: Gayle Sweetwine Saini will demonstrate synagogue and community archives, Jewish federations and Jewish genealogical and historical societies, Jewish newspapers, community histories, university and historical libraries.
• Researching at Chicago's Newberry Library: Jack Simpson, curator of Local and Family History, will demonstrate how to use the library, emphasizing Jewish research.
• Genealogical Resources of Milwaukee and Southeastern Wisconsin: Manning Bookstaff will demonstrate Wisconsin Jewish and general genealogical resources, such as libraries map collections, historical societies and libraries and more.
• The Jewish Agriculturalists' Aid Society: Philanthropy and Jewish Farm Settlement in the Heartland: Sandy Rikoon focus on the JAAS (1888-1910) which provided loans and other support to more than 425 Jewish families living on heartland homesteads and farms.
• Research in the Genealogy Center of Allen County Public Library, Fort Wayne, IN: Curt B. Witcher will highlight the center's Jewish genealogical research resources, including the Yizkor collection, periodical collection, online databases, local history material from across North America, and share technological enhancements benefiting researchers in the newly expanded facility.
  
  To learn more about the program, speakers' bios, registration and other details, click here
  
  The conference is co-hosted by the Jewish Genealogical Society of Illinois, the Illiana Jewish Genealogical Society and the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies (IAJGS).

Hungary: Blog for resources

I recently discovered János Bogárdi's radixlog.com blog with news on Hungarian family history and genealogy, including Jewish genealogy.

If you are searching Hungarian resources, János offers an interesting selection of postings. Here he discusses the online handbook of Hungarian chronology.

Although originally published in 1912 (and revised in 1940), Prof. Szentpétery's Chronologia and Calendar of Diplomatics most of the knowledge and tools they provide still prove to be useful for those digging deep into the history of Hungary or that of families. Mind you, these handbooks are written in Hungarian.

It has been online since 2007 at the Hungarian Electronic Library.

The Jewish Calendar section is titled IX. Zsidó naptár és naptári ünnepek and runs from page 35-39.

Yes, it's in Hungarian, but if you are searching your Hungarian ancestors, this might help you with spelling of holidays in that language. I found it interesting.

He addresses other topics of Jewish research interest as well as general resources for everyone, such as maps and databases:

Here: A new book about Hungarian Jewish metrical books - and more Jewish research items. The archivist at the Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives, Zsuzsanna Toronyi published an article about the history of the archives in the 2007/3 issue of the Levéltári Szemle (Archives Gazetteer, the journal of the Hungarian Archivist Association).

Here: FamilyTrackers.com publishes Romanian Jewish database. A new set of data has been added to FamilyTracker.com's offers. This time their partner in Romania, Marcel Mindrescu added a collection of transcribed Jewish Cemetery records from Oradea, Romania (formerly Nagyvárad, Hungary). The press release also mentions that this is meant to be only the beginning, "the first of many planned from this part of the world".

San Francisco Bay Area: Eastern European workshop, April 12

Founded in 1898 in San Francisco, the California Genealogical Society and Library is now located in Oakland.

The CGS will present a series of research workshops this year focusing on specific ethnic groups and geographic regions. The first is "Eastern European Research," set from 10.30am-2pm Saturday, April 12.

Gen-blogger colleague Stephen J. Danko of Steve's Genealogy Blog and Jeremy G. Frankel, San Francisco Bay Area Jewish Genealogical Society president are the excellent and interesting speakers.

The program includes two lectures, a lunch break and a hands'-on session for attendees to share ideas, speak with the experts and access computers.

"Don't Reinvent the Wheel," with Jeremy Frankel

"Before researching for original documents in faraway repositories, try finding other people who have done what you are attempting. Is there a special interest group for your geographical area of interest? Can you find someone who has already visited East European archives? Can they tell you what the date range, condition, access issues are? As with all foreign research, start by digging around in your own backyard. You might be surprised at what you find."

"Finding ancestors amidst the changing map of Europe," with Steve Danko

"Finding the place of origin of an immigrant is crucial to finding historic records for that immigrant's ancestors. Complicating matters are the changing borders in Europe during the past two centuries as the territorial acquisitions obliterated some nations from the map. Border changes in Europe affected not only the map of Europe, but also the records on which genealogists depend to document their ancestors' lives."

The workshop is free for CGS members ($10 for others) but limited to 15 people. Reservations are required.

Born in London, Frankel trained as a cartographer and surveyor and has been investigating his roots in Poland and Lithuania for more than two decades. He joined the SFBAJGS after moving to the area in 1993 and has been president since 2003. He has studied San Francisco and California Jewish history. His current projects include a San Francisco-born Jewish boxing glove manufacturer, and a Polish Jewish anarchist who co-founded the first sailor’s union in San Francisco. He's a professional genealogist, research families who lived in the UK, US and parts of Eastern Europe.

Danko is a native of upstate New York. In the course of writing his daily genealogy research blog, he has reconnected with lost cousins in Poland, the UK, and the US. He's been researching his family history for nine years and has conducted research in Poland and Lithuania and visited his ancestral villages. He also conducts client resarch on records in the US, Poland, Italy and Canada. His languages are Latin, German and Polish and has a working knowledge of several others and is currently studying for a Professional Learning Certificate in Genealogical Studies from the National Institute for Genealogical Studies in Toronto.

For more information and details, click here.

Fun: What punctuation are you?

Jasia of CreativeGene wrote about this when she read it our colleague Lori Thornton's blog.

Jasia is a comma, Lori's a hyphen, and I'm a question mark.

You Are a Question Mark

You seek knowledge and insight in every form possible.

You love learning.

And while you know a lot, you don't act like a know it all.
You're open to learning you're wrong.

You ask a lot of questions, collect a lot of data, and always dig deep to find out more.

You're naturally curious and inquisitive.

You jump to ask a question when the opportunity arises.

Your friends see you as interesting, insightful, and thought-provoking.
(But they're not always up for the intense inquisitions that you love!)

You excel in: Higher education

You get along best with: The Comma

If you'd like to try the punctuation quiz, click here.

What punctuation mark are you?

If you like DNA, you'll love 'Eye on DNA'

Eye on DNA is a blog focused on all aspects of DNA, written by Dr. Hsien-Hsien Lei. The blog offers great DNA graphics, the writer's rich sense of humor and her postings cover the gamut from genetic genealogy to other scientific issues.

Hsien offers a weekly round-up of DNA headlines, and I was happy to find that this week she pointed to both Tracing the Tribe and my recent Jerusalem Post article on "Oral history meets genetics."

Her posting today included some interesting DNA headlines, including the 24th Gene Genie Carnival here; the Aminopop blog, with interesting postings and images; Alltop which carries many categories of science stories; and a Baltimore Sun story on African American genetics and genealogy.

And then there was this:

Schelly Talalay Dardashti has a new article - When oral history meets genetics - in the Jerusalem Post. Don’t miss the sidebar: Screening for Jewish genetic diseases.

Thanks, Hsien!

New York: DNA and classic genealogy, April 13

How DNA and classic genealogy join to solve a family history puzzle is the topic of the Jewish Genealogy Society of Long Island's next meeting, set for 2pm, Sunday, April 13, in Plainview, NY.

Herb Huebscher is administrator of the Hubscher Family DNA Project at FamilyTreeDna.com and it has been my pleasure to know him for a number of years. His knowledge and dedication to both Jewish genealogy and to genetic genealogy is well-known to many researchers. He has spoken on the project at several annual conferences, each time updating the audience with new information. The puzzle pieces are falling into place, providing a coherent picture of how it all happened.

Long involved in his genealogy, he ventured into DNA-based genealogy in 2002 as the Hubscher Family DNA Project group administrator, and his project report was published in Avotaynu (Winter 2003). Since 2004, he has been the group administrator/coordinator of a DNA-based genealogy research project linking a number of seemingly disparate families to a common ancestor.

The puzzle involves 40 disparate families (some 55 individuals) with a common paternal ancestor several hundred years ago. Major advances reported towards the solution:

New Y-DNA results on 55 persons representing 40 families (Litvaks and Galizianers)

Advanced DNA testing techniques reveal matching results and shared DNA anomalies,

Common haplogroup subclade identified for all families,

Development of a phylogenetic tree showing interfamily relationships,

Explanation of Levite status in only some families,

Comparison of group DNA characteristics with recent tests of known Sephardic Levites,

Answering the question: Sephardi or Ashkenazi roots? and

Refined estimate of the Common Ancestor's lifetime and place.

Born in Vienna, Austria, Huebscher came to the US as a child in 1938. An electrical engineer, he received BEE, MS, and MBA degrees. Following an electronics industry career, he was a Long Island University full-time business strategy professor, and then an adjunct professor before his 1998 retirement.

Admission is free. For directions or additional details, click here.

Winnepeg: A grave man

The Winnipeg Free press offers a spotlight on "A grave man," Lorne Raber of Eden Memorials.

Lorne Raber hears Winnipeggers say it all the time:

"When I die, I don't want any sort of marker. I want to be cremated and have my ashes scattered."

But to Raber, owner of Eden Memorials and president of the Monument Builders of North America, throwing one's identity to the winds is an incomprehensible preference.

"No one's going to know who you were!" he says. "Everyone that walks the face of this Earth should be remembered.

"To my way of thinking, it means your life wasn't worth anything. It doesn't matter what size (of memorial) it is, but there should be something. Wouldn't you want people to know you existed?"

He mentions a memorial destined for a Saskatchewan cemetery and a recommendation for an inscription in the deceased's Hungarian, and even what he wants his own epitaph to read.

When he took over the business, Raber went to Minnesota to see how granite is quarried and finished, so he could speak about it first-hand.

He became active in the 700-member Monument Builders of North America that in 1999 he became one of only 125 certified memorialists in the world, and the only one on the Canadian Prairies. Among the requirements, he had to write a four-hour exam on everything from how granite is created to grief counselling. He became so active that he was elected president of the group this year, the first Jewish head in its 102 years.

The company has created monuments for Holocaust survivors on which the names of family members who perished are carved on the back. A Star of David made from barbed wire symbolizes this kind of remembrance.

For Raber, the manner in which Jews were killed in concentration camps is another reason why the ever-increasing popularity of cremation does not sit well with him.

"As a Jewish person, knowing of the Holocaust, I can't comprehend why anyone would want to get cremated," he says.

One comment that will warm the hearts of genealogists: He believes that a woman's maiden name should be on her gravestone: "It helps place her in the context of family members and community, he says, and is vital for genealogy. Maiden names are really, really important. What we do (creating headstones) is a historical record."

There's more on designing headstones, on cremation, monument wording.

While some people joke about his work, he says, "Don't make fun of me. I get to spell your name at the end."

If you're a current or former Winnipegger, you'll recognize many of the references in his "vital signs" at the end of the story.

New York: Jews in Medieval Spain

“Re-Visiting Al-Andalus: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Medieval Spain” is a conference to be held in New York's CUNY Graduate Center at 4pm, Tuesday, April 15. The program is free and open to the public.

Professor Jane S. Gerber is director of CUNY's Institute for Sephardic Studies.

The institute is devoted to research, special projects and curriculum development on the civilization of the Jews of Spain and the Middle East. It offers public lectures and teacher training workshops and encourages the study of the Sephardic experience in the doctoral programs at the Graduate Center. Its oral history collection explores the experience of Sephardic Jewish immigrants to the United States. Among its ongoing projects is the development of education modules to integrate the Sephardic experience in teaching Jewish History.

Among the programs:

“The Distant Dove: Pilgrimage Poems by Judah Halevi,” with Raymond Scheindlin, Professor of Medieval Hebrew Literature and Director, Shalom Spiegel Institute of Medieval Hebrew Poetry, Jewish Theological Seminary

“My Soul Departed Spain for Zion,” with Ross Brann, Milton R. Konvitz Professor of Judeo-Islamic Studies and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University

“The Jews of al-Andalus: The Last Phase,” with David Wasserstein, Professor of History and Director of Jewish Studies, Vanderbilt University

For more information, click here.

New York: The Legacy of Sepharad

The legacy of Sepharad/El Legado de Sefarad is being noted with a series of rograms through April 21 in New York, co-sponsored by the American Sephardi Federation with Sephardic House and the Instituto Cervantes

Instituto Cervantes New York and Casa Sefarad-Israel in Madrid are pleased to present “El Legado de Sefarad” (“The Legacy of Sepharad”), a three-week program aimed at showcasing the vitality of Sephardic culture in today’s world. After
their expulsion from Spain in 1492, the Iberian Peninsula Jews have kept alive a rich and diverse cultural legacy. The idea behind this program is to celebrate the music, literature, film, language, and other aspects of Sephardic culture, with a particular emphasis on contemporary expressions of this historically important heritage. This program was made possible thanks to the generous support of Grupo Santander.

6pm, Thursday, April 10: The Majorcan Chuetas: History and Literature, with Professor/writer Leah Bonnin

A lecture on the Chuetas, a well-known Majorcan community that was historically stigmatized on account of its Jewish origin. Today, 15 Jewish last names survive within the Chueta community, whose population is close to 30,000.

6pm, Wednesday, April 16: Contemporary Argentine Jewish Cinema

"Jews in Space/Judios en el espacio" (2005): After years of silence, Santiago reencounters Luciana, a love from his childhood. Together they try to organize a Passover dinner to bring the entire family together after the grandfather's suicide attempt.

"Cara de queso/Cheese Face" (2006): The story of four Jewish boys who attend a summer camp in the outskirts of Buenos Aires at the beginning of the 1990s.

6pm, Monday, April 21: Sephardic Song concert

A recital of old Sephardic songs for voice and piano, with Manuel García-Morante (piano) & Yrene Martínez-Roca (soprano): Limited seating; Advance ticket purchase recommended ($25; $15 for Instituto Cervantes members). Reservations: events@cervantes.org

For more information and details, click here

Caribbean: Sephardic records

If you are searching your Sephardic ancestors in the Caribbean and elsewhere, visit Sandra de Marchena's Our Ancestors, Our Life .

It focuses on Sephardic Jewry Genealogical Data in Curaçao along with a collection of family trees of its Sephardic community. Currently the database includes 17,000 souls; additional names and dates are added daily. De Marchena calls this is "a living, growing project."

For 10 years, de Marchena has been collecting ancestors' names and she has compiled a large family tree of the island's Sephardic congregation Mikve Israel-Emanuel, which goes back to the first 17th-18th century Sephardic settlers.

From the database, individual family trees can be extracted for most of the congregation's Sephardic families. She makes these available on CDs for each family. Each CD contains a descendant tree (book format) and a quarterly report (kwartierstaat). For a limited time, de Marchena will include on ancestor tree (pedigree) per CD for one selected individual in the database.

The 12 original families on the island in 1659 are ABOAB, ABOAB CARDOZE, CHAVIS, DE LEON, DE MARCHENA, DE MESA, HENRIQUEZ COUTINHO, JESURUN, LA PARRA, OLIVEIRA, PEREIRA and TOURO.

Names represented in the database include: ABINUN DE LIMA, ALVARES CORREA, BRANDAO (PEREIRA BRANDAO), CAPRILES,CARDOZE, COHEN HENRIQUES (Amsterdam and London), CURIEL, DE CASTRO, DA COSTA GOMEZ, DE MARCHENA, DE SOLA (and MENDES DE SOLA), DELVALLE (SALOM DELVALLE), GOMES CASSERES, JESURUN (JESURUN HENRIQUEZ), LEVY MADURO, MENDES CHUMACEIRO, MORENO (MORENO HENRIQUEZ), MORON (HENRIQUEZ MORAO), NAAR, NAMIAS DE CRASTO, PENHA (LOPEZ PENHA), PENSO, PINEDO, SALAS, SENIOR, VALENCIA (SEMAH DE VALENCIA).

In searching through the site and viewing sample trees and descendant reports, I found many additional families related by marriage, and from other locations.

De Marchena's interest in genealogy was inherited from her mother, when she started seaching for her ancestors. After participating as the "official" family genealogist for the first SALAS family Reunion in 1999, she was hooked.

For a decade, she's been entering all the birth, death and marriage dates and relevant data of the families and their descendants, and has conducted research in national archives, synagogues and cemeteries in Curaçao, the Dominican Republic, Colombia, Panama and St. Thomas.

To view samples of genealogical reports and sample trees, click here.

There are photos of archives, cemeteries, registers and people in various geographical locations, where she has spoken to descendants, digitized personal archives and researched national archives, cemeteries and synagogues. One photo from Panama shows a synagogue wall of yarhzeits with many names and dates.

Click here to see sources and an extensive bibliography of books on Sephardic Jewry, which should be required reading for researchers in this field. Some books refer to other families who were in the Caribbean or had links to those communities.

For Curaçao, as an example, she has digital copies of all birth and death registers in the Mikvé Israel-Emanuel archives; all marriage documentation recorded by the Emmanuels in "History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles;" selected entries from the death records in "Precious Stones of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles" by Isaac S. Emmanuel; visited the Berg Altena Jewish Cemetery and digitized most tombstones; digitized available family registers and life cycle announcements of both foundations and private families.

For genealogical links, click here. There are some familiar names such as Harry Stein and Alain Farhi and other sources to check out.

Los Angeles: A DNA 'Brand'

There's an excellent LA Times story by retiring columnist Cecilia Rasmussen ("Then and Now"). FamilyTreeDNA.com and Bennett Greenspan play an essential role in determining the DNA of Glendale mover-and-shaker Leslie Coombs Brand.

For more than 20 years, I've been writing about local history, and never once has Southern California let me down. I've found no shortage of tycoons and beggars, dreamy spiritualists, mad-eyed killers. This 227-year-old city has had a few angels, but it's the others who often make for the most fascinating storytelling. The housewife from Milwaukee who in the 1920s lived in a house above Sunset Boulevard -- secretly keeping her lover in the attic for a decade until he came downstairs to murder her husband. The religious cult that called itself the Divine Order of the Royal Arms of the Great Eleven and used sex, religion and animal sacrifices to separate believers from their money. The 18-year-old who in the 1880s fatally shot her boyfriend in the eye and was acquitted after her lawyers called her a victim of "menstrual madness."

I've written about cowboys and swindlers and crazy inventors, about a one-eyed Swiss watchmaker and a silent screen star who broke into film at age 75, after real-life dramatic experience as a Civil War spy.

To get those stories, I've had to do quite a bit of sleuthing -- trekking through mountains, visiting crumbling mansions and knocking the dust off ancient court files.

But in all the years, I've never gone to quite the lengths I had to for this, my final Then and Now column.

There was no way around it. To be sure this story was true, I needed DNA tests. But I'm jumping ahead of myself. Maybe I should start at the beginning.

An unlikely affair

If you live in or work in or ever pass through Glendale, you no doubt have seen signs that say Brand. It's the name of the library, the biggest park and the boulevard that cuts right through the center of town.

The Brand in question is Leslie Coombs Brand, known as L.C., who is called the "Father of Glendale."

Read the complete story and how DNA confirmed certain rumors here.

Mensa & Jewish genealogy

American Mensa members score in the top 2 percent of the general population on standardized intelligence tests. Some 50,000 people belong to the US group, with some 100,000 worldwide members. It is estimated that some 6 million Americans are eligible for membership.

This year's 2008 Mensa Colloquium - "Tracking Granny's Granny" - will focus on genealogy during September 12-14 in Salt Lake City.

The event invites Mensans from around the country to discover new genealogy techniques, share stories and uncover shared family histories.

Planned sessions will cover records, methodology and accuracy, problem solving, Internet resources, resources on the ground and more. The tentative program (subject to change) includes the following speakers and sessions:

James Warren:
If Our Ancestors Had E-mail

Colleen Fitzpatrick, Ph.D:
You Will Never Look at Your Old Photos the Same Way Again!
A Different Kind of DNA

Sharon DeBartolo Carmack:
He Lived, He Married, He Died - But I Want More!

Christine Rose:
Problem Solving: Strategies for Success

For speaker bios, click here.

It is interesting that the five largest Mensa chapters (New York Metro, Chicago area, San Francisco Metro, Washington DC Metro, Greater Los Angeles) are in areas with major Jewish genealogical societies. I'm curious as to whether these JGSs have ever asked how many members are also Mensa members?

I did ask Mensa why there was no Jewish genealogy session and American Mensa director Jill Beckham replied: "I am sure you can understand that when preparing a program we are not always able to cover all the areas that registrants might like. With a short time frame we had to choose broad areas to cover."

I wonder when Mensa's surveys will include genealogy as a check-off box when asking about members' interests and activities.

The last survey (2005) with responses from nearly 45,000 members indicates that 1,755 are interested in astronomy, 383 are coin collectors, 2,048 are into golf and 809 into martial arts. Among the respondents, nearly 30,000 have college degrees and nearly 5,500 speak at least two languages in addition to English.

Chicago 2008: updated program, drawing winner

An update from the Chicago 2008 conference committee spotlights some of the themes of this year's event: Midwestern Jewish genealogy research, genetics and DNA, the newly available ITS records, Latin American research, SIG programming (including experts from European archives) and more.

To view the program now - which is more complete than the last time I checked - click here. Additional programs are expected in the coming weeks; session days and times are always subject to change for a variety of reasons.

A March 28 drawing was made for a free conference hotel room - the winner was Barbara Freedman of Vancouver, BC, Canada; this will be her sixth conference.

Reminder: Early discounted registration ends on April 30.

For more information on the conference, click here.

Chicago 2008: Gesher Galicia's murder mystery

Chicago 2008 conference attendees are beginning to learn about SIG luncheon speakers. Gesher Galicia's luncheon program - Monday, August 18 - is spotlighted today.

Gesher Galicia research coordinator Pamela Weisberger announced that Columbia University professor Michael Stanislawski will speak on "A Murder in Lemberg: Politics, Religion, and Violence in Modern Jewish History," based on his book of the same name.

He asks the question: How could a Jew kill a Jew for religious and political reasons?

The book's research took place in the Lviv Historical Archives, a topic that Stanislawski will continue discussing in the first part of the Gesher Galicia SIG meeting at 3:30pm the same day.

Many people asked this same question after an Orthodox Jew assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Itshak Rabin in 1995. But historian Michael Stanislawski couldn't forget it, and he decided to find out everything he could about an obscure and much earlier event that was uncannily similar to Rabin's murder: the 1848 killing - by an Orthodox Jew - of the Reform rabbi of Lemberg(now L'viv, Ukraine).

Eventually, Stanislawski concluded that this was the first murder of a Jewish leader by a Jew since antiquity, a prelude to twentieth-century assassinations of Jews by Jews, and a turning point in Jewish history. Based on records unavailable for decades, "A Murder in Lemberg" is the first book about this fascinating case.

On September 6, 1848, Abraham Ber Pilpel entered the kitchen of Rabbi Abraham Kohn and his family and poured arsenic in the soup that was being prepared for their dinner. Within hours, the rabbi and his infant daughter were dead. Was Kohn's murder part of a conservative Jewish backlash to Jewish reform and liberalization in a year of European revolution? Or was he killed simply because he threatened taxes that enriched Lemberg's Orthodox leaders?

Vividly recreating the dramatic story of the murder, the trial that followed, and the political and religious fallout of both, Stanislawski tries to answer these questions and others. In the process, he reveals the surprising diversity of Jewish life in mid-nineteenth-century eastern Europe. Far from being uniformly Orthodox, as is often assumed, there was a struggle between Orthodox and Reform Jews that was so intense that it might have led to murder.

Allan Nadler wrote in "The Forward:"

"Beyond the sheer literary pleasure of his captivating narrative and the inherent novelty of a Galitsianer Jewish murder mystery, the author adds important insights into the complex, now vanished, world that was Jewish Galicia ... Michael Stanislawski has written not only an important historical morality tale about the dangers of religious extremism, but also a cautionary tale about the unforeseeable perils unleashed when governments try to force modernity, or, for that matter democracy, on a deeply traditional religious society."

Stanislawski is Nathan J. Miller Professor of Jewish History at Columbia University, where he also serves as associate director of the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies and chair of the Interdepartmental Program in Yiddish Studies. His books include "Autobiographical Jews and Zionism" and the "Fin de Sicle."

Weisberger says the talk is of interest not only to Galician researchers but to anyone interested in world history and what happens when politics and religion collide.

While all conference registrants are invited to both the SIG meeting (free) and luncheon, the luncheon requires a paid reservation ($39) through the conference website; click this page. If you have already registered for the conference but not the luncheon, log in and add this event. Luncheons with speakers like Stanislawski sell out quickly, so don't wait too long to make your reservation.

Ukraine: Vinnitsa OKs Jewish cemetery hi-rises

If your ancestral town is Vinnitza, 160 miles from Kiev, in Ukraine, you might be interested in this JTA newsbrief:

Ukrainian Jews to protest construction

A Ukrainian city issued a permit to build on the site of an old Jewish cemetery.

Authorities in Vinnitza, 160 miles from Kiev, will allow the SMU-2 Ltd. construction firm SMU-2 Ltd. to erect two high-rise buildings on the site.

A local rabbi told JTA that representatives of the local Jewish community are planning to express their concern in a letter to city and national leaders.

Igor Kulyavtzev, the acting chair of the Vinnitza Jewish community, said workers building a Christian chapel recently near the cemetery site dismantled several tombstones. City residents reportedly used some of the stones for their own needs.

UK gen show: Jerry Springer in new series

The new series of Who Do You Think You Are will spotlight Jerry Springer, as well as TV star Patsy Kensit, politician Boris Johnson, model Jodie Kidd, interior designer Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen and broadcaster Esther Rantzen.

TV host Springer, whose Jewish parents escaped to London from Nazi Germany just three days before the outbreak of the Second World War, sets out on a painful journey that takes him from New York and back to Germany.

Kensit will "embark on an investigation into her father's murky past, wanting to understand the roots of his criminality and to discover how far back 'the family trade' goes."

Llewelyn-Bowen delves into his seafaring roots while Rantzen investigates a "mystery and tales of a black sheep in the family that has always intrigued her".

A nibble of prevention: Dr. Paul Talalay

While I have previously featured members of the Dardashti clan at Tracing the Tribe, it's time now for another tale of the Talalay, focusing on Johns Hopkins Medical School researcher Dr. Paul Talalay, the energizer bunny of research at 85.

I was delighted to read this great article, "A Nibble of Prevention," on our cousin Paul and his accomplishments in the April 2008 issue of Johns Hopkins University magazine. He focuses on discoveries of foodborne substances that can help sufferers of cancer and other conditions. His discoveries may allow us to pursue our genealogy research in a healthier state.

The New York Times' put him on the front page, while Popular Mechanics listed his discovery as one of the top 100 scientific discoveries of the 20th century, which encouraged the growing trend that people can improve their health by eating the right foods.

These days, most of the stories Talalay unfolds involve 30 years of chemoprotection research — a hunt for the substances, mostly from plants, that can boost the human body's ability to stave off disease — and how they dovetail with a new laboratory and center that will be built to expand the search. Currently dubbed the Chemoprotection Center (its final moniker likely will carry the name of a benefactor or two), the lab will be dedicated this month as part of the new Science and Technology Park at the medical campus. Talalay hopes it will create a flurry of new discoveries of foodborne substances that can aid people suffering from any of a wide number of conditions beyond cancers, including Alzheimer's disease and cardiac problems.

Paul's late nephew Victor - whom we lost last year - and I spent years collaborating on the family history and sharing research. I couldn't have done it without his assistance. We long joked that a Talalay family reunion must feature green foam rubber broccoli heads as centerpieces. Why foam rubber? Google "The Talalay Process" to learn more about the family's involvement in that creation.

The story includes information on a topical broccoli extract that protects skin cells from sun damage and on his 15 milliseconds of screen fame as he portrayed a raincoat-clad dirty old man exiting an X-rated theater in the John Waters' movie "Polyester." His students loved it.

In case you think the name sounds familiar, one of his daughters - Rachel Talalay - is in the film business ("Tank Girl," "Freddy's Dead" and other gems). She got her industry start working with Baltimore's John Waters and went on from there.

Paul Talalay's research showed why broccoli is good for us. Now, a new center at Johns Hopkins is looking for more foods that could stave off cancer and other diseases.

It's morning in the office beside Paul Talalay's lab. As the coffee brews and his staff mills in with questions and out with answers, the man who turned acrid, dark-green crowns that resemble brains gone horribly wrong into something desirable explains the major misgiving surrounding an illustrious, six-decade-long career in research.

"My greatest fear is that on my tombstone, they'll say, 'He made broccoli famous,'" he says.

Read the entire article and learn why we should all be eating broccoli sprouts.

The Talalay-Tollin clan are descendants of Rabbi Leib ben harav Mikhl Talalay of Mogilev and nearby Vorotinschtina (the agricultural colony) in Belarus, but with a history of Sephardic origin (and recently discovered 14th century archival documents!).

Early branches were in Bobruisk, Gorkiy, Novgorod Severskiy (Chernigov gubernia, Ukraine) and elsewhere, with others in St. Petersburg and Moscow. The family spread out from the Crimea to Siberia as well as Baku, Chaussy, Novgorod Severskiy, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Sochi, Novosibirsk, Akademgorod, Kazakhstan and elsewhere).

Paul's branch moved from Mogilev to Moscow to Berlin to London and then to Canada and the US.

Among its members were rabbis, religious court judges, Talmudic scholars, secular artisans and craftsmen who became more contemporary musicians, architects, historians, medical doctors, forensic pyschologists, scientists in many fields (including the Soviet space program), archaelogists, writers, journalists and even a Gen-blogger.

Some branches studied at the Mogilev Classic School and then left Mogilev and Vorotinschtina for higher education in St. Petersburg and Moscow, while others began to immigrate to Europe and North America.

The earliest known US immigrant was Mendl Talalay (Max Tollin) in 1898, who settled in Springfield, Massachusetts. Other early branches settled in Newark, Boston and Philadelphia (including several Talalay brothers who elusively changed their name to that of their sister's husband - Feinstein - and decided to disappear among all those other Feinsteins).

Branch descendants live all over - Israel, Italy, the UK and Australia - with additional more recently arrived branches in North America; some remain in the FSU. Some of the newer arrivals live in Chicago, and I'm hoping to meet them when I attend this August's international Jewish genealogy conference.

Philadelphia's Jewish history, April 14

Jewish Philadelphia is the topic at the next meeting of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Greater Philadelphia when the group's founding president Harry Boonin will discuss his new book, "The Life and Times of Congregation Kesher Israel" (2008).

Boonin is also the author of "The Jewish Quarter of Philadelphia, A History and Guide, 1881-1930" (1999), and provides Jewish Philadelphia walking tours.
The meeting starts at 7.30pm Monday, April 14, at Reform Congregation Keneseth Israel in Elkins Park. For more information, click here.

The Jewish Exponent recently published a story on Boonin's new book

The date was Dec. 15, 1898. Congregation Kesher Israel at 412 Lombard St. was decked out in American and "Jewish colors," according to an article that appeared in the Jewish Exponent at the time.

Early American Zionist leaders Dr. Schepschel Schaffer and Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, who had both attended the Second Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, just weeks earlier, had been invited by synagogue leaders to speak on the timely topic of creating a Jewish homeland.

Those gathered to hear their passionate speeches on the support needed from abroad for the Zionist movement were mostly Russian Jewish immigrants who had come to America to escape persecution and the pogroms their relatives were still facing in the world they'd left behind.

The immigrants listened intently to the ideas conveyed by the doctor and the rabbi. Besides coming to the United States in search of freedom, maybe there were other options, the two men suggested -- perhaps the time had come for Jewish people to have their own state.

This is just one anecdote that local author Harry D. Boonin sketches out in his second book, The Life and Times of Congregation Kesher Israel, which was published in February.

Boonin's first book on Philadelphia's Jewish Quarter described the city's immigrant neighborhood, its Yiddish newspapers, synagogues, friendship societies and other organizations and places. During the research and writing of the first book, he decided that Kesher Israel's story needed to be told.

It took another seven years.

Why did he focus on this congregation?

"Kesher Israel jumped out at me," said Boonin, 71, a Warrington resident. He explained that the central location of the synagogue placed the congregation at the forefront of Jewish life in the city and, for many years, it was the largest synagogue in the heart of the Jewish quarter, surrounded by Jewish homes, businesses and pushcart markets.

The congregation brought in well-known speakers during the 1890s and it played a big role in the community. It is one of only a handful of synagogues from that era still standing and, following renovations, still holds services in its historic building.

Read the complete article here.

Readers are reminded that - in 2009 - the JGSGP will co-host the 29th IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy, August 2-7, at the Sheraton Philadelphia City Center Hotel. Mark your calendars.

Italy: Out of the woodwork

Rabbi Barbara Aiello is the descendant of Calabrian conversos (anousim, the forced ones).

With roots in Toledo, Spain, her ancestors escaped to Sicily, to Reggio Calabria, north to Nicastro and then fled to the mountains of Calabria - to Serrastretta - where the hills provided protection. They were among the “anousim,” or “forced ones” for centuries.

She organized the February 2008 Italian Jewish Roots Conference in Sarasota, Florida for Italians who suspect they have Jewish roots. Along with 40 participants, were DNA specialist Elise Friedman, Jewish genealogist Kim Sheintal and Rabbis Frank Tamburello and Aiello. Most of the participants are actively searching for their Italian Jewish roots.

A conference CD ($54) is available with presentations, articles, Italian Jewish traditions from Calabria and Sicily, and ways to begin an Italian Jewish roots search. Order it at her website.

Aiello was also interviewed by The American Magazine, which carries stories on Italian life.

Every Monday and Thursday in the 1920s Antonio Aiello dutifully traveled 25 kilometers from his Calabrian hometown of Serrastretta to study the Torah, the Jewish holy book, at the home of a man known as the “Rav,” or rabbi. He often hitched a ride on an artichoke cart, or so he told his daughter Barbara Aiello, who is now a rabbi.

The darker side of the story is that no Jews were officially said to reside in Calabria at the time. The Spanish Inquisition and subsequent Roman Catholic persecution had decimated a once-flourishing Jewish community. Jews had been expelled or forced to convert. For a time, so-called “new Christians” held onto their Jewish ways closed doors. Jewish holidays were celebrated secretly. Gradually, the “marranos” — or crypto-Jews — were assimilated into Catholic society, eradicating most traces of Jewish life from southern Italy.

Aiello’s presence in Calabria fulfills a promise she made to her father Antonio. She is now the rabbi in tiny Serrastretta’s “Ner Tamid del Sud” (Eternal Light of the South) synagogue. It’s the first active synagogue in Calabria in five centuries. Although forced underground, “In nearly every small town and village there are remnants of Jewish cultural and tradition that thrived here as early as 2,000 years ago,” she says.

Both of her immigrant parents descended from crypto-Jewish families. In Pittsburgh, her grandmother lit Shabbat candles in the basement. “We’re in America now! There’s religious freedom here!” Antonio told his mother, Aiello’s grandmother. “You never know,” was her solemn rebuttal. A GI in Europe, he was at the liberation of Buchenwald. “Do something for the Jewish people,” he implored his daughter.

After serving in the Virgin Islands, New York City and Florida, she accepted - five years ago - a job at Milan’s Lev Chadash (New Heart) synagogue, making her the country's first non-Orthodox rabbi, and arrived in Serrastretta two years ago. She bought a house that had been in her family for generations and also purchased adjoining units to make space for the synagogue. In the process she discovered that the town is full of Jews. Many are finally ready to start talking about their faith.

It is her responsibility, she feels, to help her neighbors understand why she is in the town and speaks frequently with the local parish priest. In December, Aiello invited him to the first Chanukah celebration in a Jewish synagogue in Calabria in 500 years. He announced the event to his parishioners; 45 attended the holiday event — and all spoke about their Jewish roots.

Asked about anecdotes, she described the funeral of a woman she had befriended and whose son invited Aiello to their home.

I was astounded. A number of low chairs for the mourners were placed in a circle. The mirrors were covered in black. A small candle burned on the table where a plate of boiled eggs was arranged in bite-size pieces. I recognized these as Jewish mourning traditions. I asked the son about them. He said these were family, not church traditions. He told me that by those traditions the chairs would remain arranged that way for one week (shiva) and that there would be a special meal in his mother’s honor on the 30th day after her death (sheloshim). When I suggested that the family, called Paletta, might be Jews, the son said he assumed so but that they never talked about it openly “I think my parents were afraid,” he told me. I was touched and thrilled by the experience.

Every Calabrian historian has ignored the Jewish presence she says because historical studies were funded by the Catholic Church which didn't want to acknowledge its role in persecuting Jews. "Or it could be that with the 'success' of the Inquisition — that is, when Jewish communities were wiped out completely and Jews either fled or converted — historians believed that Judaism itself had also been eliminated."

To read the complete article in the March 2008 issue, click here.

Fun: Fishing the Great Gefilte Lakes

As I've frequently mentioned, my grandparents had a bungalow colony in Kauneonga Lake, NY - heart of the Catskills and all that, the genuine Borscht Belt. Born in May, I spent every summer there from birth through high school.

One day, when I was a very little kid, my father took me fishing on our dock at the lake. We were fishing for lox (smoked salmon, for those who may not know the term), he said. And, how do you catch lox? You use a bagel for bait, of course. Yes, I know - stop laughing! - but I was only about 5 years old and it seemed logical at the time.

It didn't bother me that we didn't catch any of that lovely orange lox (nova, of course, the best).

What likely traumatized me for life was returning home and telling the story to people who first said "What?!?" - then snorted (as in "milk comes out of your nose" snorting) - and then fell off their chairs, holding their bellies and laughing hysterically to the point where they could have used oxygen.

I'm not sure I've ever gotten over that, although there's been a lot of lox under the bridge since then (and bagels - onion, of course - and Philly cream cheese!).

Since it's erev Pesach (which means anytime after Purim and before the first Passover seder) and bagels may not be the best thing to write about, here's the next best thing.

Warning: Do not read while drinking milk or any other liquid!

GELFILTE FISH STORY
by LAWRENCE SHERRY

Many times I have been upset by people who seem to think that gefilte fish is some kind of mixture you make in the kitchen rather than one of Hashem's creatures. This has led me to explain exactly what a gefilte fish is. So once again here goes.

Each year as soon as the frost on the Great Gefilte Lakes (located up state New York somewhere in the Catskill Mountains) is thin enough to break the surface, frum fishermen set out to "catch" gefilte fish. Now unlike your normal fish, gefilte fish can not be caught with a rod and a reel or your standard bait. The art of catching gefilte fish was handed down for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. For all I know Moses used to go gefilte fish catching. I'm sure that the Great Rambam (Maimonides) when he wasn't busy playing doctor spent his leisure time G/F fishing.

Enough already, you say, so how is it done? Well you go up to the edge of lake with some Matzoh. Now this is very important!! It has to be Shmurah Matzoh or the fish will not be attracted. You stand at the edge of the lake and whistle and say "here boy", "here boy". The fish just can't resist the smell of the Matzoh They come in mass to the edge of the lake where they jump into the jars and are bottled on the spot.

Again you must remember that there are two kinds of gefilte fish. The strong and the weak. The weak are your standard fish which are in a loose "broth" (it is actually the lake water). Now the strong are special. They seem to be in a "jell". These fish are actually imported from the Middle East where they are caught in the Dead Sea. They have to be strong to be able to swim through that "jell".

Last year a well-meaning gentleman tried to correct me by stating, "Reb, shouldn't they be saying "Here Boychic". I didn't have the heart to tell him, Boychic is a Yiddish word and Gefilte Fish don't understand Yiddish, only Hebrew and surprisingly, English! There has been a big debate as to whether to use the Hebrew or English in the US. With a big break from tradition, shockingly the English is accepted by almost all G/F fishermen. Some still insist on using the Hebrew and consider the use of "Here Boy" as Reform and not halachicly acceptable. However the Congress of OU Rabbis (who have to be present at the lakes when the fish are bottled) uniformly accept "here boy"! The time of the catch is very important! The fish can not be caught before Purim is over or the fish are considered Chometz! Besides the fish know when Pesach is coming and will not respond to the Matzoh before the proper time.

I am still a little bothered by which end of the fish is the head and which the tail (not to mention that I am not sure where their eyes are). This is a small price to pay the luxury of eating this delicacy.

Have you ever had the baby G/F? Oy, they are so cute that I feel a little guilty eating them! Have a great Pesach and hope that the Matzoh doesn't affect you like Pepto Bismol or worse yet, prunes!

Shalom, Reb Sherry

This had escaped me until Lyn Blyden, president of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Washington State, sent it to me. Then I had to track it down. I've found it on three websites, but still have no idea who Lawrence Sherry is or where or when it was originally published. It is found here, here and here.

New York: Steve Morse, April 13

Do you find the Jewish calendar and its technicalities confusing?

The Jewish Genealogical Society of New York is hosting Dr. Stephen P. Morse as he demystifies the calendar and also helps attendees to search the New York State Census.

The program begins at 2pm, Sunday, April 13, at Abraham Joshua Heschel High School, at West End Avenue and W. 60th Street. Note that this is not the society's usual venue (Center for Jewish History).

Jewish genealogists need to understand the Jewish calendar as Jewish vital records use Jewish dates, and this includes birth, marriage, death records as well as gravestones.

The Jewish calendar is both a solar and lunar calendar, with the months being synchronized to the moon and years to the sun. As such, the rules governing the calendar can be a bit daunting. This talk presents the calendar in an easy-to-understand – and sometimes tongue-in-cheek – fashion.

You don't need to be an expert in computing dates - there are programs for that, says Steve - but it will help to understand the calculations. He'll cover the 19-year calendar cycle, the origin of time, errors in the Jewish and secular calendars, and the use of Hebrew letters to represent dates on tombstones.

In his census program, he'll offer information on New York State censuses, which began in 1790. Most valuable for genealogical purposes are 1905, 1915 and 1925, which correspond to the huge immigration wave.

There were numerous assorted aids for navigating through those censuses, but they were often hard to use, covered only specific years or boroughs, and were not available at all libraries. The One-Step website rectifies that situation by putting a universal finding aid on line that covers all the boroughs of New York City in each of the three census years. This presentation describes the One-Step approach and contrasts it to the previous methods.

Steve - creator of the One-Step Website - has received major awards for his innovation: Outstanding Contribution Award and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the IAJGS; Award of Merit from the National Genealogical Society, and the first-ever Excellence Award from the Association of Professional Genealogists.

In his other life, Steve is a computer professional with a doctorate degree in electrical engineering. He has held various research, development, teaching positions, authored numerous technical papers, written four textbooks and holds four patents. He is best known as the architect of the Intel 8086 (the granddaddy of today's Pentium processor), which sparked the PC revolution 25 years ago.

For more information and directions to the Heschel school, click here.

Lithuania: LitvakSIG adds 20,000+ records

More than 20,000 new records have been added to LitvakSIG's All Lithuania Database, housed on JewishGen. They include revision, tax and voters lists.

Some towns included are: Alytus, Antakalnis, Batakiai, Birzai, Butrimonys, Darsuniskis, Daugai, Erzvilkas, Girkalnis, Jieznas, Jurbarkas, Kelme, Kraziai, Kvedarna, Merkine, Nemunaitis, Nemaksciai, Pumpenai, Punia, Raseiniai, Rietavas, Silale, Siluva, Skaudvile, Stakilskes, Sveksna, Taurage, Trakai, Varena, Veivirzenai, Vidukle, Vievis,Zaslai, Zemaiciu Naumiestis,Ziezmariai and others.

LitvakSIG District Research Groups project coordinator Dorothy Leivers reminds readers that records in this latest upload were distributed as Excel spreadsheets to qualifying donors at least a year ago.

Researchers who find records of interest are asked to consider joining the research group for that particular area. Those who join and make a financial donation (which goes to making more records available) receive complete spreadsheets in advance of the material appearing on the publicly accessible All Lithuania Database on JewishGen, which already includes some 500,000 records.

Additional records mean readers may make more connections, while qualified contributors receive data for numerous towns making it easier to widen the search.

The Vital Records Indexing Project seeks to raise monies for the purpose of funding the translation of approximately 800,000 Lithuanian Jewish Vital records from the 19th and early 20th centuries. The translations produced as Excel format spreadsheets are distributed to qualified donors.

We primarily seek qualifying donors for each town [$100+] as well as major contributors wishing to create challenge grants although all contributions are welcome. The translated records are eventually uploaded to the All-Lithuania Database [ALD] as prescribed by LitvakSIG policy.

The current policy allows translations to go online one year after qualifying donors receive their translations.

For more information and to search the database, click here

Los Angeles: Who do you think you are? - April 13

Come see two episodes of the hugely successful BBC family history series, "Who Do You Think You Are?" screened by the Jewish Genealogical Society of Los Angeles.

"Stories of Discovery: Films & Lecture on the Surprises and Joys of Genealogy" begins at 11am Sunday, April 13, at the Milken Jewish Community Campus in West Hills. The day includes a bagels and lox brunch from noon-1pm.

The show - which has just been licensed to NBC for a US version - has captured the imagination of British viewers, turning the nation into amateur family historians.

Each episode follows a celebrity tracing their family tree to reveal surprising, extraordinary and moving stories of their ancestors. I've seen both episodes scheduled for the day and recommend them.

The first to be screened follows shows actor/writer Stephen Fry tracing his UK family back to modern-day Slovakia (former Hungary) with stops in Vienna, as he learns the fate of relatives who did not escape before the Nazis invaded.

From 1-2pm, Jim Van Buskirk will speak on "My Grandmother's Suitcase: A Family Memoir."

Before his mother turned 80, she told him a secret: "You are Jewish." She then showed him the contents of his grandmother's suitcase, filled with photographs, letters, and documents. Not long before this, Jim had published an essay exploring his mysterious, lifelong attraction to Judaism. He continues to look for answers to his family's history - and his identity by researching his genealogy, talking to previously unknown relatives, and re-examining the contents of his grandmother's suitcase. Van Buskirk's essays have been featured in various books, newspapers, radio broadcasts and magazines — most recently Avotaynu. He is currently Book Group Coordinator at the Jewish Community Library of San Francisco.

From 2-3pm, another WDYTYA episode will be screened, this one with Nigella Lawson.

Nigella Lucy Lawson is an English journalist, food writer, broadcaster and television presenter. She traces her mother's side of the family, the Salmons (originally Solomons — owners of J. Lyons and Co.) to Ashkenazi Jewish ancestors in the Netherlands and the Rhineland of Prussia, Germany. She discovers that one of these ancestors, Coenraad Sammes (later Coleman Joseph), fled to England to escape a prison sentence following a conviction for theft! Follow her to Amsterdam as she explores possible Sephardic roots in the local archives.

Brunch reservations required by April 9; $15 per person. The lecture and screenings are free for members, $5 for others. There are even door prizes (one year's subscription to Footnote.com, Ancestry.com and an Ancestry DNA test kit).

For directions and more information, click here.

Connecticut: Fairfield's Jewish history

The Fairfield Museum is presenting a special exhibit - Celebrating Our Cultural Legacies: Fairfield’s Jewish Community - from April 6-May 11, according to this article.

Jewish settlement in the area began in the early 1700s, and continued with immigration and settlement in Bridgeport and Fairfield. The exhibit includes Judaica representing holiday traditions, home observance and synagogue worship, and demonstrates

the fascinating story of Jewish settlement in our area, including the arrival of German Jewish immigrants in the early 1850s and those from Eastern European countries who came in the late 19th century, fleeing persecution. Reaching back further, the exhibit highlights the story of Andris Trubee, a merchant believed to be Fairfield's first Jewish resident, who settled here around 1716–1718.

The founding of local synagogues and social service organizations is also explored. After World War II many of Bridgeport’s Jewish residents migrated from the city to suburban areas, including Fairfield’s east side and neighborhoods along the Fairfield-Bridgeport border. Today, Park Avenue, Stratfield Road and Fairfield Woods Road are home to several synagogues, as well as the Jewish Community Center and Jewish Family Service. Congregation B’nai Israel is the oldest, tracing its roots to 1855 when a plot of land was purchased in Fairfield for a Jewish cemetery. Ahavath Achim, founded by Hungarian Jews in 1905, built a new synagogue in Fairfield in 1963, the same year Congregation Beth El, Fairfield ’s conservative synagogue, also dedicated their new building.

The exhibit will feature objects loaned by local families, organizations and synagogues. The earliest objects - two Shabbat candlesticks - most likely date to the late 1700s. A hand-carved box, used to hold the lemon-like citron or etrog at Sukkot (the harvest festival), is the newest object, made by Fairfield resident Harvey Paris in 2007.

Among the antiques from Russia, Poland, Holland, Morocco and Germany with contemporary items from Israel, highlights are a Russian silver Tzedakah box (1860); a German Seder towel (1853); silver yads or pointers for reading the Hebrew text of Torahs, and a Torah crown; Moroccan brass Passover Seder plate; a Megillah Esther scroll; Hanukkah menorahs and dreidels from different countries; a hand-decorated linen wimpel or swaddling cloth (1929); and an elaborate ceremonial wedding ring.

Readers in the area may attend a free and open-to-the public reception from 6-7.30pm Thursday, April 10, followed by a special presentation - "Scroll Survivor: The Kladno Torah Research and Restoration Project" - by Ellin Yassky, Ph.D., a exhibit consultant, and members of Congregation Beth El which holds the scroll from the Czech Republic.

For more information, click here.

Australia: Virtual Jewish tour

Here's a virtual Jewish tour of Australia, covering the origins of the community, early Jewish life, community growth and post-war developments.

When the American colonies revolted in 1776, England lost its biggest prison – convicts were routinely shipped to the thirteen colonies to make room in the perpetually crowded British jails. As a result, England annexed the island of Australia in 1788 as a new prison colony. While Australia had been known to Europeans since its discovery in the sixteenth century, the English were the first to settle there on a permanent basis, aside from the native Aboriginal population.

Among the 1,500 first prisoners - called the First Fleet - were 16 Jews. By 1817, new arrivals and freed prisoners organized a community and cemetery. More people came from England and Germany and they formed synagogues and community institutions in Sydney and Melbourne. Sydney's Great Synagogue was built in 1878. Before that the congregation met in houses and shops until the first synagogue was built in 1844. Other synagogues were formed in Hobart (1845), Launceston (1846), Melbourne (1847) and Adelaide (1850).

The 1850s gold rush attracted even more Jews who settled in rural locations, although many came to the cities by the end of the century.

According to the site, Australia "remains to this day the only country in the world, other than Israel, whose founding members included Jews. As a result, Jews were treated as equal citizens from the outset." They fully participated in economic, political and cultural life, and the 19th century saw its members serve as Melbourne's mayor, South Australia's premier, House of Representatives' speaker, and Parliament's speaker.

Most are Ashkenazi, but there was a small Sephardic community in the 19th century that disbanded in 1873, but has been revitalized in the 20th century. Waves of immigrants in the late 19th-early 20th centuries included Russian and Polish pogrom refugees, another wave following World War I and then when Hitler came to power in 1933.

Today, some 120,000 Jews live among a total population of more than 20 million. It is the largest community in the East Asian Pacific region. While 80 percent of the community lives almost equally split between Melbourne and Sydney, there are other communities elsewhere. The country boasts 81 synagogues and 18 day schools (more than 50 percent of Jewish students attend Jewish schools), several newspapers and periodicals, Jewish museums and libraries, cultural centers and clubs, kosher restaurants.

Of course, there are several branches of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Australia in Melbourne, Sydney, Perth and elsewhere.

For more information, visit The Great Synagogue and The Melbourne Hebrew Congregation

New Mexico's Crypto-Jews: book, conference

The Society of Crypto-Judaic Studies 18th annual conference will be held August 3-5, in Phoenix, Arizona. At the 2007 event, photographer Cary Herz of New Mexico was honored for her contributions and dedication (see more below).

The Forward carries a review of Herz's book, “New Mexico’s Crypto-Jews: Image and Memory” (University of New Mexico Press, 2007), by Eli Rosenblatt.

In northern New Mexico’s Sandoval County, there is a tombstone of a World War II veteran in a cemetery nestled in the desert brush. The name of the man, who was born in 1921 and died in 1980, is Adonay P. Gutierrez, and it is engraved on the stone below a cross. Nine different Native American communities reside in the surrounding counties, and even if cemetery visitors see his cross before his name, this lone Jew lies among them.

For Cary Herz, New Mexico photography correspondent for The New York Times, Gutierrez’s memory is one way to begin exploring New Mexico’s anusim, Hebrew for “forced ones” or Jews forced into hiding during the Spanish Inquisition. Her new book, “New Mexico’s Crypto-Jews: Image and Memory” (University of New Mexico Press, 2007), gathers photographs spanning the experience of the descendants of Jews who settled in New Mexico during its conquest by Spanish explorers.

“I kept hearing about these people, who had come over with the conquistadors — Jews,” she said in a recent interview with the Forward, “and I asked, ‘How could they be here?’" ...

The book is the first visual exploration of descendants of Jews who fled Iberia during (and after - some well after) the Inquisition, traveled with Spanish explorers and settled in today's New Mexico.

About 60, Herz is the daughter of Central European Jews, works as an editorial, commercial and documentary photographer, covering the Southwest since she moved to New Mexico in 1984. “I envisioned a book like this a long time ago,” she noted. “My goal was not to photograph cemeteries. I wanted to show the world their faces.”

In 2007, the Society honored Herz. She has been the official conference photographer and has worked to capture images of the people whose ancestors, through families' oral histories and genealogical records, knew about their heritage. Herz has sought out symbols at gravesites, artifacts and icons that might point toward the presence of the descendants of crypto-Jews who came to the New World.

The Call for Papers for the upcoming conference reads:

We invite papers on crypto-Judaism from any discipline (e.g., anthropology, history, sociology, philosophy, literature , music, etc.) and from any geographic location or time period. We also welcome papers on other aspects of the Sephardic experience and other communities whose historical or sociological experience is similar to that of the crypto-Jewish community. All interested scholars and professionals, including advanced graduate students, are invited to submit proposals for papers, presentations or workshops.

Proposals:

--are welcome from individuals with personal stories and genealogical or other research relating to crypto-Judaism

--may be for individual papers/presentations or for complete sessions on specific topics.

--must include a 200-word abstract and a brief bio.

--deadline for proposals is June 5.

The society offers two $200 scholarships to encourage graduate student participation and submission of proposals.

Proposals or inquiries should be sent to Seth Kunin s.d.kunin@durham.ac.uk.

DC: National Archives' free genealogy fair

The National Archives in Washington, DC, is hosting its fourth annual genealogy fair this year from 9.30am-4.30pm Wednesday, April 23. It is free and open to the public.

The event is smack-dab in the middle of Passover - make sure to bring some edible holiday goodies for lunch - and head on over if you're in the neighborhood.

This year's program includes:

Federal records located at the National Archives relating to general genealogy, World War I, and the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Sessions will offer guidance on topics including Civil War pension files, Freedmen's Bureau marriage records, World War I draft registration records, and New Deal publications. National Archives staff will demonstrate how to use databases including the Archival Research Catalog (ARC) and Access to Archival Databases (AAD).

Speakers include Marian Smith (USCIS historian); author Raff Ellis (Kisses from a Distance: An Immigrant Family Experience) and National Archives experts Susan Abbott, Bill Creech, John Deeben, Kenneth Heger, Claire Kluskens, Constance Potter and Reginald Washington.

The schedule of lectures and demonstrations is here.

The location is the Research Center Lobby, National Archives Building, 700 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, Washington D.C. Rememer that government-issued ID or student ID is required to enter. For reservations, directions and other information, click here.

WorldVitalRecords: Employee research perk

Wouldn't you like to be able to research your own family history for 10% of your paid time? Does that sound like a dream job? That's what WorldVitalRecords employees will be receiving, writes founder CEO Paul Allen in this blog posting.

Allan refers to Marissa Mayer's talk at Stanford about Google's culture of innovation. She said that every Google engineer is permitted to work on his or her own pet project for 20% of their time. She added that in the second half of 2005, 50% of Google products came from that 20%.

Blogged Allen:

That is a very different culture from most companies I've ever seen, where few people are energized with new ideas, and those that have great ideas are often frustrated by politics or lack of resources to the point where they have no hope that their ideas will be heard or implemented.

Allen described some recent encounters that helped him decide on this new perk:

A genealogist recently asked Allen, "Why can't we get you guys (meaning those of us who run genealogy internet companies) to do genealogy yourselves so that you
know what we need you to build for us."

Although he defended himself by saying that he's read 2,000 pages about genealogy sources in the past year, the genealogist continued, "But reading about genealogy, and doing genealogy are two very different things."

Allen also saw another blogger's post from several months ago wishing that "Dick Eastman could be the CEO of a genealogy internet company so that it would be sure to do all the right things."

And so he decided to do something that related to these encounters and his March 18 posting included:

And I know that if we take the time to use our own products continually, that we will have more insights about how to improve the user experience.

So, today I am announcing 10% time for all employees at FamilyLink.com.

I am asking every full time employee in the company to spend 10% of their paid time working on their own family history. This includes researching, collaborating, preserving, and sharing. It means using our web sites and other software and web sites as well.

I will commit to do the same.

In addition, I am asking each employee to document the frustrations and obstacles they encounter along the way. And whenever they have an idea about how to improve something to jot it down.

I will regularly review the top ideas that are submitted by each employee.

As Marissa Mayer kept a list of the top 100 personal projects under way at Google, I will keep a running list of the top 100 best ideas for improving the online experience in family history.

To determine the best ideas, I may use my own subjective judgment or have a few advisors review them with me, or maybe even rely upon the "wisdom of the crowds" and use customer surveys to gather votes.

Each month, I will award bonuses to the employees who submitted the best ideas.

Once we have this structure in place, I'd like to open it up to our customers as well, and reward them for taking the time to tell us how we can improve our services.

There's more, so click here to read it all.

JewishGen: Message from Warren Blatt

Warren Blatt has been named JewishGen's managing director following the departure of founder Susan King. Here is his message to the JewishGen community:

As you are aware, Susan King has stepped down as the Managing Director of JewishGen, after 20 years of dedicated service. In addition to founding JewishGen, Susan has been an inspiration and motivating force for all of us, and will be greatly missed. We at JewishGen and the Museum of Jewish Heritage wish Susan all the best, and will continue to embrace her spirit and dream as we move forward.

As I assume the post of Managing Director, I want to send greetings to those who already know me, and introduce myself to what I hope will be new friends and colleagues. I have been part of JewishGen since 1990, and been its Editor-in-Chief for many years.

As JewishGen moves into this new phase, we will be integrating more fully with our parent organization, the Museum of Jewish Heritage. As of April 1, 2008, the offices of JewishGen have been relocated from League City, Texas to the Museum of Jewish Heritage - A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, located in Manhattan's Battery Park. JewishGen has been an affiliate of the Museum since 2003, and this move was initiated in order to better integrate JewishGen's functions with Museum programs and provide a seamless delivery of services to the JewishGen community.

The mailing address of JewishGen is now: JewishGen, Inc., Museum of Jewish Heritage, 36 Battery Place, New York, NY 10280. Phone: (646) 437-4326 . Fax: (646) 437-4328.

One of the unfortunate consequences of this transition is that two of our dedicated employees were not able to join us in the new location. The entire JewishGen community joins to acknowledge the work of Joanna Fletcher and Becky Rogers, who have served JewishGen for over 8 years.

Over the next few months, in addition to becoming more fully integrated with the Museum, we will be announcing several new projects, as well as giving you a glimpse into our plans for the future of JewishGen.

Michael Tobias and I continue Susan's tradition, by striving to grow JewishGen and take it to the next level. But be assured that we will not venture too far from our roots; we are built on our volunteers. JewishGen's volunteers are our wealth and strength, and that will always remain. We are always looking for enthusiastic volunteers to join our family. Both Michael and I hope to see many of you at the IAJGS Conference in Chicago this summer.

I look forward to working with all of you over the months and years ahead, as JewishGen continues to be the leading internet resource for Jewish genealogy.

Again, I wish to greet all of you, and as we move into this holiday season, wish you and your family a Chag Sameach and Happy Pesach, from me and my family.

Warren Blatt
Managing Director
JewishGen

JewishGen: Museum of Jewish Heritage statement

JewishGen's home page today includes a message from the Museum of Jewish Heritage's director Dr. David G. Marwell concerning changes at the genealogy site.

As most Genners know, JewishGen has been a Museum affiliate since 2003.

A Message from the Museum of Jewish Heritage

Dear Friends:

After more than two decades of extraordinary leadership, Susan King’s tenure as Managing Director of JewishGen has come to an end. Susan’s vision and dedication saw JewishGen develop from a bulletin board in the early Internet era to the premier online resource for Jewish genealogy today.

Perhaps more than any other person, Susan, through JewishGen, has changed the way research on Jewish family history is conducted. Her inspiration has not only provided missing branches for family trees, but has also brought long separated families together. She has left a profound mark on a pioneering institution. The JewishGen family owes Susan a substantial debt of gratitude, and we wish her the very best for the future.

David G. Marwell, Ph.D.
Director
Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust

His message leads to a Museum press release:

Susan King, A Revolutionary in the World of Jewish Genealogy, To Leave JewishGen

NEW YORK, NY – Susan King, the founder of JewishGen, the primary Internet source connecting Jewish genealogy researchers from around the world, is leaving the organization after 21 years.

“Susan King’s tenure as Managing Director of JewishGen has ended after more than two decades of extraordinary leadership of that pioneering institution,” announced Dr. David G. Marwell, director of the Museum of Jewish Heritage--A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in New York City, which oversees JewishGen. “Susan’s vision and dedication saw JewishGen develop from a bulletin board in the early Internet era to the premier online resource for Jewish genealogy today.”

Dr. Marwell also announced the appointment of Warren Blatt, currently the Editor-in-Chief of JewishGen, to serve as JewishGen's new Managing Director. Mr. Blatt, who has been actively involved with JewishGen since 1990, was awarded the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies' Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004. “Warren Blatt brings great skill and experience to his new position, and we look forward to working with him,” Dr. Marwell said.

In an email to the JewishGen community, Susan King wrote, “We can all take enormous pride in what we have established collectively. There is nothing better than knowing that you have fulfilled a dream and to know you have made a difference in so many lives. Even though I may be moving forward, please know that JewishGen will remain in my heart forever.”

Founded by Ms. King in 1987, JewishGen is the principal Internet source connecting Jewish genealogy researchers from around the world. With more than 300,000 registered users, its most popular features are the JewishGen Discussion Group, the JewishGen Family Finder, ShtetLinks sites for more than 200 communities, Yizkor Book translations, and databases containing more than 13 million genealogical records.

Created to assist those interested in researching their Jewish ancestry, JewishGen, Inc. is staffed primarily by volunteers. It is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt, non-profit corporation relying on the generosity of its users to ensure continued growth. JewishGen has been an affiliate of the Museum of Jewish Heritage since 2003.

The Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust educates people of all ages and backgrounds about the rich tapestry of Jewish life over the past century — before, during, and after the Holocaust. Current special exhibitions include Daring to Resist: Jewish Defiance in the Holocaust; Sosúa: A Refuge for Jews in the Dominican Republic; and “To Return to the Land…” Paul Goldman’s Photographs of the Birth of Israel. The Museum offers visitors a vibrant public program schedule in its Edmond J. Safra Hall and is home to Andy Goldsworthy’s memorial Garden of Stones, as well as James Carpenter’s Reflection Passage, Gift of The Gruss Lipper Foundation. The Museum receives general operating support from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and is a founding member of the Museums of Lower Manhattan.

JewishGen: How it all began

Readers who are new to Jewish genealogy may think that JewishGen has been around forever. There was a time when JewishGen did not exist, although we barely remember those days.

Here's an article providing the details of how it all began. Every worthwhile endeavor begins with the creative spark of an inspired individual - Susan King provided that spark and lit a veritable fire. She provided a gathering point for thousands upon thousands of people around the world who wanted to research their Jewish families.

In 2004, Genealogical Computing magazine carried an excellent story about Jewishgen founder Susan E. King, It described her background, how she had become involved in genealogy and the journey that resulted in JewishGen.

Authored by Barbara Krasner-Khait, it is archived here.

Susan E. King: Founder of JewishGen

When I was growing up, I felt like the last person on the block to join in,” says New Orleans native and Texas transplant Susan E. King, founder of the popular Internet home of Jewish genealogy, JewishGen. Susan had always wanted to do something different, but she says, “Most attempts were failures. I wasn't always able to pull it off.”

That pattern changed when the marketing communications entrepreneur joined her parents on a visit to a Galveston Jewish cemetery. During that trip, she learned her family migrated from Spain to Courland (now in present-day Latvia) and that subsequent family members then arrived in the Americas through Veracruz, Mexico, and New Orleans, eventually settling in Galveston.

King and her parents tried to find family in the cemetery but were unsuccessful. They went to see a cousin, a 92-year-old woman, who told them the correct cemetery was just two blocks away. In that cemetery, King discovered a huge obelisk with eight or nine burials. One of the tombstones was for her great-grandfather, born in “Reggae” (Riga), Kurland. She consulted a map but couldn't find “Reggae.”

The next day, while giving a marketing communications presentation to a major Texas-based oil company, she related the story about the cemetery visit with her parents. A man sitting at the conference table said, “You might want to get involved in genealogy.” He scribbled some extensive notes on a sheet of paper and placed it in her pocket. Later she realized he had outlined how she could get started in genealogy. He counseled her to sign onto the National Genealogy Conference Bulletin Board.

The Birth of JewishGen

When King first developed an interest in genealogy, she was running her own marketing communications company and was looking for a hobby. She became fascinated with computers and bought herself one of the first IBM “luggables.”

King participated in the National Genealogy Conference Bulletin Board for two or three years. She asked a lot of questions. She had exhausted all the knowledge other participants had but still had unanswered questions. She thought about how nice it would be to have a specific Jewish forum. She says, “I wasn't crossing the pond.”

She wanted to set herself up as an echo. She configured her computer and in a few months, she started a Jewish genealogy echo. She quickly had 30 to 40 regular users. When an unwanted religious faction bought into the echo, King decided to pay to move hers into an Israeli bulletin board. She began using the Internet to initiate a mailing list. To make the forum more accessible, she offered a bulletin board, e-mail, and newsgroup options.

JewishGen began about 1987 on the Fidonet bulletin board circuit and quickly segued to the Internet in 1989–90 to a mailing list, making the forum more accessible to individuals all over the world. In fact, JewishGen was one of the first genealogy websites to allow text-based e-mail searches of data, including the precursor to the current Yizkor Book database, early data from Russian Era Indexing of Poland Project (REIPP, now Jewish Records Indexing or JRI-Poland), and the JGFF (then the Jewish Genealogy Family Finder).

King says of JewishGen at this early time, “We were hobbyists, but we formed an informal, executive-type committee.” The “we” includes Bernie Kouchel, Warren Blatt, Gary Mokotoff, King, and others.

Although the JewishGen website began to witness an exponential rise in visits, says King, “We did not have a clue to the enormity of what we were doing until the mid-to-late nineties.”

The site's impact hit the unassuming innovator, oddly enough, far away from home in Krakow, Poland. JewishGen had done some work for the Oswiecim (Auschwitz) Museum and was in the process of building JewishGen Shtetlshleppers, a travel program to visit ancestral towns in Eastern Europe, with new destinations and partners. While in the old part of Krakow, King entered a synagogue. A woman there spoke initially in French and then switched to English. She was on a business trip with her husband. She asked King who she was with. King explained, and the woman told her that she and her husband log onto JewishGen every morning—from France. To King, this was a telling tale. JewishGen had impact all over the world and in ways she could never have imagined.

She characterizes JewishGen as the “first bringing together of the Jewish people since we left Egypt. This was the first time Jews had a place to come together—no matter what their personal religious beliefs or practice.”

JewishGen has grown organically with a free-spirited attitude toward development. Says King, “When we first started, we had no model. We created as we went.” If someone offered an idea, she and her team thought about whether it could be done. The site gets more than 4.5 million hits a month.

Despite its popularity, the site has not grown slick or commercial. The focus is constantly on the end-user experience. King says, “We keep it simple on purpose, so users can get to where they want to go.”

A Mission to Live By

What sets JewishGen apart from other genealogical informational and transactional websites, says King, is that it has “held steadfast to its mission and has never wobbled.”

JewishGen's goal is to ensure that Jewish lives, both past and present, woven into the fabric of social and cultural history, rise again from the ashes of the destroyed communities. To this end, JewishGen is determined as well as dedicated to do whatever it takes to ensure it preserves Jewish history for future generations.

Because the mission is so broadly stated, opportunities for site expansion and development are wide. Still, King admits that not all ideas turn into reality. “Some people think we should be all things to all people,” says King. That would not be true to the mission or to financial capabilities. JewishGen relies on the voluntary financial support of its thousands of daily users.

Although she's been at the helm, King claims she has always been fortunate to have a great crew and outstanding working relationships, especially in light of the fact that JewishGen's staff members are based all over the world.

“JewishGen is a team effort,” she says. “I've allowed people to excel. I push them to the limits.” In the early days, they communicated by e-mail. Each staff member is focused, creative, and pitches in to offer something valuable.

Aside from the salaried staff, JewishGen relies on about 700 volunteers worldwide. More than 1,200 people contribute to the site's data sources. Yet with all this active volunteerism, JewishGen continues to face a challenge.

Merger with the Museum of Jewish Heritage

On 31 December 2002, JewishGen publicly announced its new relationship with the Museum of Jewish Heritage—A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. King viewed this as a necessary step to accommodate the website's future growth and financial requirements. The museum took over the daily business operational needs including administration and finance, communications and public relations, human resources and volunteer management, and fundraising.

As a result of the announcement, Susan King was named Managing Director of JewishGen, a position through which she continues to oversee the day-to-day operations and serve as the conduit for new projects and programs.

Innovation Click

Susan King may have been the last on her block to join in. Maybe she was biding her time. With JewishGen, King allows her interests in computing, genealogy, and creative marketing to blend. She says, “It was something that just clicked. I was in the right place at the right time with the right interest.”

Israel: Bene Israel database, April 9

JFRA Israel's Ra'anana branch will host Nissim Moses in a program about the little-known Bene Israel genealogy database at 7pm Wednesday, April 9.

Nissim has lived in New Delhi for decades and has recently returned to live in Israel. He has compiled a family tree of the seven branches descending from the original 14 individuals of his Bene Israel community. Currently, it includes some 11,600 names of individuals who live in India, Israel, the US and around the world.

Whenever he meets someone from his community - no matter where they live in the world - he can provide them with nearly their complete family history.

In addition to speaking about Bene Israel history (one of three Jewish communities in India), he will also discuss similarities between the Hindu and Jewish religions.

The meeting will take place at Beit Fisher, 5 Klausner St, Ra'anana. Doors open at 7pm, the program starts at 7.30pm. Admission: members, NIS 5; others NIS 20.

JewishGen: Warren Blatt is new director

In a follow-up to Susan King's resignation email, Warren Blatt has been named JewishGen's managing director. Most recently, he has been the site's editor-in-chief.

For more information on the changeover at JewishGen, click here.

NEW YORK, NY – Susan King, the founder of JewishGen, the primary Internet source connecting Jewish genealogy researchers from around the world, is leaving the organization after 21 years.

“Susan King’s tenure as Managing Director of JewishGen has ended after more than two decades of extraordinary leadership of that pioneering institution,” announced Dr. David G. Marwell, director of the Museum of Jewish Heritage--A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in New York City, which oversees JewishGen. “Susan’s vision and dedication saw JewishGen develop from a bulletin board in the early Internet era to the premier online resource for Jewish genealogy today.”

Dr. Marwell also announced the appointment of Warren Blatt, currently the Editor-in-Chief of JewishGen, to serve as JewishGen's new Managing Director. Mr. Blatt, who has been actively involved with JewishGen since 1990, was awarded the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004.

“Warren Blatt brings great skill and experience to his new position, and we look forward to working with him,” Dr. Marwell said.

In an email to the JewishGen community, Susan King wrote, “We can all take enormous pride in what we have established collectively. There is nothing better than knowing that you have fulfilled a dream and to know you have made a difference in so many lives. Even though I may be moving forward, please know that JewishGen will remain in my heart forever.”

Founded by Ms. King in 1987, JewishGen is the principal Internet source connecting Jewish genealogy researchers from around the world. With more than 300,000 registered users, its most popular features are the JewishGen Discussion Group, the JewishGen Family Finder, ShtetLinks sites for more than 200 communities, Yizkor Book translations, and databases containing more than 13 million genealogical records.

Created to assist those interested in researching their Jewish ancestry, JewishGen, Inc. is staffed primarily by volunteers. It is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt, non-profit corporation relying on the generosity of its users to ensure continued growth. JewishGen has been an affiliate of the Museum of Jewish Heritage since 2003.

JewishGen: End of an era?

All of us are JewishGenners - or should be. The site has provided so many of us with information and database records enabling family connections through the generations.

We couldn't have accomplished so much without JewishGen. If it hadn't already existed, we would have had to create it along the way.

For some time, there have been rumors that something was happening at JewishGen.

Today, the following message from the site's founder - Susan King - was carried on the site's discussion groups:

There are times when it's almost impossible to find the right words, and perhaps this is one of those times.

Twenty-two years ago (seems like eons), I had an idea that grew up to be JewishGen. Over the years you may have been one of those wonderful people who offered help and together we nurtured that brainchild of mine. Together we loved it and lived it.

It has been an extraordinary ride and looking back from where we have come, we can all take enormous pride in what we have established collectively. It is a legacy that I know will follow me wherever I go for the rest of my life. There is nothing better than knowing that you have fulfilled a dream and to know you have made a difference in so many lives. I will cherish these years forever.

I am ever so grateful for the true friendships I've developed along the way, ever so grateful for the spirit of the volunteers who have worked with so much dedication over these many years creating and building a real grassroots effort that was at the core of my vision and so grateful that JewishGen has been at the center of my life for so many years.

I can't thank everyone enough for lending their talents, their skills, their hearts, their ideas and their time. Effective Monday, March 31st, I will no longer be associated with JewishGen either as an employee or as a director. Even though I may be moving forward and perhaps defining yet another life purpose, please know that JewishGen and all of you who walked the walk with me, nurturing my dream along with yours, will remain in my heart forever.

Susan

Susan E. King
JewishGen Founder