Los Angeles: The global Jewish diaspora, May 18

Is your family Ashkenazi but with a Sephardic oral history? Does this confuse you? This program may help to explain why your family has a dual personality and will also address other aspects of the Jewish global diaspora.

Join Dr. Yitzhak Kerem at the next meeting of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Los Angeles for "Jews of the Diaspora: A Global Perspective."

The program begins at 7.30pm, Monday, May 18, at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles.

Kerem will address:

- Sephardi origins in Western Europe, Balkan research, non-Ashkenazi Jewish cultures and Israeli resources.

- Sephardi Iberian expulsees in the Rhine region who drifted eastward into Central Europe, Poland, Ukraine, Russia, and the Baltics.

- The prolific Sephardic communities of Salonika, Sarajevo, and Izmir.

- The crypto-Jewish experience.

- The tragic fate of the Sephardim and eastern Jews in the Holocaust in the Balkans, France, Italy, North Africa, Iraq, and Japanese prison camps in the Far East.

Kerem is currently a visiting professor of Sephardic studies at American Jewish University (formerly the University of Judaism) of Los Angeles. He is a Sephardic Jewry history professor at Hebrew University.

He has been editor of the Sefarad e-newsletter since 1991, a former radio moderator of Diaspora Jewry, section editor for the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust and the New Encyclopedia Judaica, as well as co-author of the Guidebook for Sephardic and Oriental Genealogical Sources in Israel.

Admission: JGSLA members, free; others, $5. The society's traveling library will be available from 7pm.

For more details, see the JGSLA website.