Reminder: No premiere date for WDYTYA

All geneabloggers were delighted when the US version of Who Do You Think You Are? was announced by NBC with a purported premiere date in April.

Unfortunately, the show's premiere has been delayed. On February 12, Tracing the Tribe posted the following: WDYTYA: Delay until summer .

Previously published posts concerning the show were the following:

January 29, 2009 - WDYTYA: Impact on genealogy, American-style?

January 22, 2009 - Lisa Kudrow: A friend in the family

April 05, 2008 - Los Angeles: Who do you think you are? - April 13

March 13, 2008 - Coming to America: NBC to produce gen show

November 24, 2006 - Is genealogy coming to prime time TV?

Unfortunately, a number of bloggers and posters to other lists have seen the page at NBC news and taken it as a "new" press release (it has no date and is the original piece posted months and months ago), believing that the premiere date shown on that page was accurate. It is not.

The show has been delayed and will NOT premiere on April 20. A new date has not yet been set, but rumors point to a summer date.

As soon as a firm date has been set, count on Tracing the Tribe to announce it.

Home Again: Whose father was he? Part 2

Don't miss part 2 of Errol Morris's "Whose Father Was He?"

This installment includes an extensive interview with Mark Dunkelman, who wrote the book on Amos Humiston. There are extensive graphics, photographs, maps, letters and more.

How did Dunkelman, who has one of the largest collections of Civil War letters of a single army regiment, become aware of the story?

During my high school years, I became good friends with a neighbor, Christopher L. Ford, who had Confederate ancestors. We both shared this interest in the Civil War. So we would discuss the Civil War often. As a matter of fact, we used to hold sort of trivia contests to see who could stump each other on our Civil War knowledge. And at one point, Chris gave me a book that he had had for a while. It’s called “Gettysburg: What They Did Here,” by L.W. Minnigh.

In the back is a collection of human-interest stories relating to the battle of Gettysburg. The very first one is about John Burns, the elderly Gettysburg resident who took his War of 1812 musket and joined the battle when the armies arrived at his hometown. And the very second story is about the Humiston children. And it included a post-war photo of the three kids, a very brief description of the story and a copy of James Clark’s poem/song, “The Children of the Battlefield.” That was my first exposure to the Humiston story.

Among other resource, Dunkelman used Humiston's pension records, which held more material on his wife and children.

This story became notable because a Philadelphia doctor obtained a photograph from a tavern-keeper. It also illustrates the power of media - a story copied in many newspapers reached the right family.

The story is one of chance - and filled with "ifs." If the wagon had not broken down, if the tavern-keeper had refused to give the photo to the doctor, if the wife had not read the story in the paper ...

Dr. Bourns did not travel directly from Philadelphia to Gettysburg. Instead, he first went to Chambersburg, a designated rendezvous for civilian physicians heading to the battlefield. Had he gone direct from Philadelphia to Gettysburg, he would not have passed through Graeffenburg, as he did by approaching Gettysburg from the west. And he would not have stopped at Schriver’s tavern and would not have seen the ambrotype.

Dunkelman found a Humiston decendant -David Humiston Kelley - from whom he learned about what happened to Philinda and her three children. Says Dunkelman,

Now, David, in addition to his archaeoastronomy work, is a very avid genealogist. He’s traced branches of his family back to King David in the Bible.

Note please that I didn't say that, but Dunkelman says it about Kelley.

He found many letters in the possession of various family families. Several are imaged in the article.

Soldiers’ families saved their letters. They were writing letters all the time back then, but these were letters chronicling the most momentous events in their lives. Often they didn’t save the letters that the wife sent the husband. They saved the letters that were sent from the husband or son describing these great adventures.

Dunkelman also discovered that Humiston sailed on a whaler from New Bedford in 1850, with the help of a neighbor who was a librarian at the New Bedford Whaling Museum.

There's more to come in the next three installments. Read the complete post at the link above and view the images.

Technology: Print your own magazine

What could you, your genealogy society, organization or institution do with your own bound glossy, full-color magazine printed on-demand and inexpensively for about 20 cents a page?

MagCloud is a new way to print magazines on demand for that price. Developed by Hewlett-Packard, it's a way to print a few hundred copies of a bound glossy, full-color magazine.

Tracing the Tribe believes MagCloud has great possibilities for genealogists. Imagine preparing a magazine for your ancestral town or your family. Groups involved in restoration projects of cemeteries or recreating histories of families or geographic areas could use this. How about a glossy full-color magazine documenting your roots trip or your family history for a milestone event?

Use your imagination. What could you use it for?

The company isn't yet sure of the market for small-run niche mags when the Internet is full of free stuff. The service has so far produced nearly 300 magazines. On the other hand, HP may not be aware of how genealogists and family historians might want to use this service!

Read all about it in today's New York Times' Technology section here. Do click on the slide show for more.

Charging 20 cents a page, paid only when a customer orders a copy, H.P. dreams of turning MagCloud into vanity publishing’s equivalent of YouTube. The company, a leading maker of computers and printers, envisions people using their PCs to develop quick magazines commemorating their daughter’s volleyball season or chronicling the intricacies of the Arizona cactus business.

“There are so many of the nichey, maybe weird-at-first communities, that can use this,” said Andrew Bolwell, head of the MagCloud effort at Hewlett-Packard. Samir Husni, a journalism professor at the University of Mississippi who plans to use the technology in his classroom, said, “We’re not talking about replacing the Vanity Fairs of the world. But it’s a nifty idea for a vanity press that reminds me of the underground zines we had in the ’60s and ’70s.”

I'm sure Andrew Bolwell is not thinking that genealogy is in the category of "nichey, maybe weird-at-first communities."

HP could - if this idea takes off - sell more digital printers to companies that would print the publications. Of course, it would also sell tankers full of HP inks. All-in-all, it could be a big money maker for HP.

Of course, the "publishers" must do their own writing and design. The completed PDF is sent over the Internet to MagCloud, and HP sends the job to worldwide partners around the world and handles billing and shipping of orders. The cost to the publisher is 20 cents a page, but they can charge anything they want for the end product.

Doreen Bloch, a student at the University of California, Berkeley, who created and runs a fashion publication, said MagCloud had made it much easier to produce her magazine, Bare, on a tight budget.

Ms. Bloch used to send final versions of Bare to a print shop in Arizona. If the editors noticed a typo or wanted to make a last-minute change, they had to pay $60 a page. “If we needed to change the cover because it had the wrong date, they gave us so much trouble,” Ms. Bloch said. With MagCloud, the editors can fiddle all they want free.

Local print shops could also see their business improve. According to one print shop which bought five of the HP presses at a cost of $300,000-$600,000 each, it needs to run presses eight hours a day to break even and 12 hours to turn a profit; that shop prints about 50,000 pages per month for MagCloud.

HP's research labs have developed software that automatically arranges photos on a text page, and it might be added to MagCloud. HP is using similar technology to make out-of-print books available, to scan old books, clean images and send to a digital press.

“By using electronic processes rather than humans, we were able to get our costs down from $2,500 per title down to about $50 per title,” said Phil Zuckerman, the president of Applewood Books in Carlisle, Mass. He said he can now afford to print single copies of old titles.

Read the complete story here.

Geneally: A new gen search engine

Geneally.com is a genealogy newswire based in the UK which plans a full launch in April with what it claims will be hundreds of thousands of new links for genealogy and family history.

I've contacted them for more details and will report back when they respond. The site says:

Geneally.com is the world's first dedicated genealogy and family search engine, built from the ground up to create a useful resource for anyone researching their ancestry.

Hundreds of new links are added each day. If you run a genealogy-related website, do contact us and we'll do our best to add the details of your site to our database.

In November 2008, Geneally acquired the former genealogy news site www.rssgenealogy.com.

There are numerous links up now - Tracing the Tribe is included - and more are being added.

I've just emailed them about adding the International Jewish Graveyard Rabbit and the general topic MyHeritage Genealogy Blog.

To contact them at the link above, you will need to go through a security word verification bit to get their email.

Home again: A Civil War photograph

More than a century ago, the lack of technology didn't stop this Civil War photo from finding the family of a soldier who died at Gettysburg.

Forensic photography, newspaper history and the Civil War make for a good story. Filmmaker Errol Morris posted this in the Zoom section of the New York Times today. "Whose Father Was He?" is the first of a five-part series appearing on consecutive days.

Morris is a filmmaker whose "The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara" won the Academy Award for 2004's best documentary feature. He also directed "Gates of Heaven," "The Thin Blue Line," "Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control,""A Brief History of Time" and "Standard Operating Procedure."

A dead soldier was found at Gettysburg with no identification except an early photograph (called an ambrotype) showing three small children. Tavern keeper Benjamin Schriver in Graeffenburg, 13 miles west of Gettysburg, somehow acquired it. Philadelphia physician Dr. J. Francis Bourns, on his way to treat the wounded, stopped in when his wagon broke down. He convinced the tavern-keeper to give him the photograph to try to locate the soldier's family.

Back home, the doctor had several photographers copy it and ordered hundreds of copies printed in carte de visite format (similar to an index card) . Back then, newspapers could not print photographs and there was no way of easily and widely transmitting this photo.

Three months after the photo was found, the important Philadelphia Inquirer printed the story on October 19, 1863, under the headline, "Whose Father Was He?"

After the battle of Gettysburg, a Union soldier was found in a secluded spot on the field, where, wounded, he had laid himself down to die. In his hands, tightly clasped, was an ambrotype containing the portraits of three small children, and upon this picture his eyes, set in death, rested. The last object upon which the dying father looked was the image of his children, and as he silently gazed upon them his soul passed away. How touching! how solemn! What pen can describe the emotions of this patriot-father as he gazed upon these children, so soon to be made orphans! Wounded and alone, the din of battle still sounding in his ears, he lies down to die. His last thoughts and prayers are for his family. He has finished his work on earth; his last battle has been fought; he has freely given his life to his country; and now, while his life’s blood is ebbing, he clasps in his hands the image of his children, and, commending them to the God of the fatherless, rests his last lingering look upon them.

When, after the battle, the dead were being buried, this soldier was thus found. The ambrotype was taken from his embrace, and since been sent to this city for recognition. Nothing else was found upon his person by which he might be identified. His grave has been marked, however, so that if by any means this ambrotype will lead to his recognition he can be disinterred. This picture is now in the possession of Dr. Bourns, No. 1104 Spring Garden [Street], of this city, who can be called upon or addressed in reference to it. The children, two boys and a girl, are, apparently, nine, seven and five years of age, the boys being respectively the oldest and youngest of the three. The youngest boy is sitting in a high chair, and on each side of him are his brother and sister. The eldest boy’s jacket is made from the same material as his sister’s dress. These are the most prominent features of the group. It is earnestly desired that all the papers in the country will draw attention to the discovery of this picture and its attendant circumstances, so that, if possible, the family of the dead hero may come into possession of it. Of what inestimable value it will be to these children, proving, as it does, that the last thoughts of their dying father was for them, and them only.

The best the newspaper could do was the word picture in bold above.

The article includes close-ups of the cloth in the two garments showing they are the same.

Writes Morris:

In the traditional detective story, someone asks around: Do you know the identity (or the name) of the people in this photograph? Here, the identification is not made on the basis of recognizing the people from a photograph. But by first “translating” the photograph into words and sentences. The ages of the children were estimated — as it turns out not far from the truth — but the telling details were their respective positions in the photograph, the fact that there were three of them, and the shirt and dress worn by the brother and sister flanking the brother in the middle were similar.

At that time, writes Morris, family photos were not common. It involved a trip to a studio or waited for a traveling photographer to come by.

Today, we are able to seamlessly integrate words and pictures — captions and photographs — but the Humiston story allows us to see how this was done beforethere were means to easily put the two together in a newspaper or broadsheet.

In Portville, NY, a woman saw the American Presbyterian story about the photo. She wrote to Bourns and requested a copy.

When she opened the letter from Philadelphia in late November of 1863, Philinda Humiston knew her husband, Amos Humiston, the father of her three children — Franklin, Alice and Frederick — was dead.

Mark H. Dunkelman wrote “Gettysburg’s Unknown Soldier,” to try to recover the man's identity.

Read the complete story at the link above. I'm looking forward to reading the next installment.

The NYT, Facebook and Jewish genealogy

Are you on Facebook? It expects to register its 200 millionth user this week.

In today's New York Times, Brad Stone's Facebook story - in the Technology section - mentions Jewish genealogy. Hooray for us!

It starts out with stats and about the controversial changes to home pages, how it's struggling to keep up with sites like Twitter, other language versions and more. But then it gets into why many use it.

In my own first weeks on Facebook, I discovered two cousins from Russia now living in Germany, a third who had been moving around and was now in Moscow, and an old friend from our Teheran days. More recently, I viewed photos of a Los Angeles family event as a tech-savvy cousin posted them from the event. Our Geneabloggers group is also strong on Facebook.

The NYT story mentions Jewish genealogist Karen Haber of Tel Aviv:

Facebook can also help rebuild families. Karen Haber, a mother of two living outside Tel Aviv, logs onto Facebook each night after she puts the children to bed. She searches for her family’s various surnames, looking for relatives from the once-vast Bachenheimer clan of northern Germany, which fractured during the Holocaust and then dispersed around the globe.

Among the three dozen or so connections she has made on Facebook over the last year are a fifth cousin who is a clinical social worker in Woodstock, N.Y.; a fourth cousin running an eyeglasses store in Zurich; and another fifth cousin, living in Hong Kong selling diamonds. Now she shares memories, photographs and updates with them.

“I was never into genealogy and now suddenly I have this tool that helps me find the descendants of people that my grandparents knew, people who share the same truth I do,” Ms. Haber says. “I’m using Facebook and trying to unite this family.”

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg says connecting people in various ways represents "a generational shift in technology."

The site is dealing with disgruntled users who are not happy about recent changes, and the story addresses the challenge of keeping 200 million people happy.

The company says users must learn how to better use privacy settings, to avoid embarrassing moments, such as conflicts between kids vs parents, employees vs bosses. The story reports that only 20% of members use privacy settings.

A social scientist who studies social networks says people spend a lot of time trying to be separate, such as parents and children.

Learn about possible future interactive advertiser tie-ins and probable user rebellion against ads.

Read the complete - and very interesting - story at the link above.

Tracing the Tribe: New features, email alerts

Tracing the Tribe has made some changes to email alerts.

Feedblitz seems to have now gotten its act together and offers some neat features. If you are receiving Feedblitz alerts, you will see this in your mailbox. The color scheme is more like the blog and there's more.

Among the neat features, follow the red arrow to the "sound" icon. Click on the icon to hear a spoken version of that post's email alert.

There is now a way to rate favorite posts - see the outlined stars on the bottom line above. Tracing the Tribe encourages you to participate.

I'm also investigating making each complete post into a downloadable MP3 audio file. Readers would be able to download and listen at their convenience. Podcasts may be next.

Are these features of interest to you? Let me know.

Food: Mexican flavors Passover

Four years ago, New York City chef Julian Medina of the contemporary Mexican bistro, Toloache, began adding Mexican-flavored Passover fare to his menu, drawing on Sephardic and Ashkenazi traditions and spicing them up.

In the early years, 10 people came to eat. Now 100 people order food for Passover. He also prepares his own creative take on fare for Rosh Hashanah and Chanukah.

This JTA story focuses on Medina and his delicious food. It might even turn into a DNA genetic genealogy story if Medina tests with FamilyTreeDNA.com, as his wife suspects Medina's family has Converso roots. The name is among documented Jewish Sephardic names.

Why would a chef from Mexico City who had dazzled clients at Maya and Pampano, two of Manhattan’s best Mexican restaurants, turn to Jewish cuisine for inspiration?

Although Medina was born a Catholic, he converted to Judaism. Six years ago, when he was dating the Jewish woman who would become his wife, he started spending holidays with her family. It sparked a curiosity about her religion that continued to grow the more he learned about Jewish rituals.

From the beginning he was intrigued by each holiday’s traditional fare as he tasted the foods his future mother-in-law prepared. It wasn’t long before he started seasoning Jewish recipes with the flavors of his youth.

Medina explored Jewish cooking, both Sephardi and Ashkenazi.

“This is what chefs do when exposed to cuisines that excite them -- they conduct research to develop new recipes,” he says. “Food is never static. It changes every day.”

Many of Medina's recipes benefit from these cuisines.

See the link for the recipes for some delicious new ideas: matzah ball soup with cilantro, jalapeno and lime juice, brisket con chipotle pepper, matzah tortillas, matzah tostada Yucatan-style (with achiote smoked sea bass salad and horseradish-jalapeno salsa), roast halibut with cauliflower "latke" and hibiscus chipotle glaze. One recipe not provided is matzah pudding with roasted bananas. I guess you'll have to drop into Toloache to learn about that one. If you do, please send me the recipe!

Medina's wife says she suspects the family has Jewish roots. Many Conversos (those forced to convert to Catholicism during the Inquisition) were among early settlers in Mexico.

The origin of their name is Hebrew and Arabic. Several Jewish families in Spain have carried the surname Medina. In the Spanish province of Cadiz, in the city Medina-Sidonia, it was customary among Sephardim to be named for the city of origin.

Of course, Sephardic genealogists know that many Sephardic surnames reflect geographic locations, not just that of Medina-Sidonia. Pere Bonnin's book, Sangre Judia, lists CADIS (Mallorca, 1391), CADIZ (Jerez, 1266), and MEDINA (Avila, 1409). There is also a MEDINA with a J1 haplogroup (carried by some 28% of Sephardic Jews) in the New Mexico Project at FamilyTreeDNA.com.

Medina might want to consider taking a Y-DNA test.

In any case, the recipes seem delicious.

Switzerland: Major WWI casualty archive discovered

British historian Peter Barton has unearthed information that could help thousands of people with their family histories, according to this BBC News story.

Barton was commissioned to carry out research into the identities of World War I casualties discovered in a mass grave at Fromelles in France, and received access to the Geneva-based Red Cross headquarters basement, the first researcher to see these records.

Details deal with capture, injuries, death, or field burials of servicemen from more than 30 countries, and sometimes include personal effects, home addresses and grave sites. The Red Cross received these details from the combatants; volunteers recorded details before sending them to the home countries.

Some of the records refer to other mass graves, with exact directions as to where they were dug, and the identities of the soldiers who were buried. Where possible, the registers include home addresses and next of kin.

He examined records untouched since 1918 and estimate there could be as many as 20 million records in the old cardboard boxes filled with thousands of index cards and hundreds of registers, compiled between 1914-1918.

According to Peter Barton, the UK's copies no longer exist, but the originals are still here and are immensely important.

"To a military historian, this was like finding Tutankhamen's tomb and the terracotta warriors on the same day," he told me.

"I still can't understand why no-one has ever realised the significance of this archive - but the Red Cross tell me I'm the first researcher who has asked to see it."

The records could potentially reveal the whereabouts of individuals whose remains were never found, or never identified. Grave after grave in the World War I cemeteries mark the last resting place of an unknown soldier.

The Red Cross must now address preservation and digitization of the paper records. Two million pounds has been earmarked for the project which will start in the fall, and will involve experts from all over Europe. The organization says it will almost certainly ask for volunteers to join their own archivists.

The organisation's head of press, Florian Westphal, admitted they had never faced a challenge quite like this: "First we have to make sure that we preserve the original records," he told me. "Then, this autumn, we will begin the process of digitising the World War I section of the archive - we expect that phase of the project to cost around four million Swiss Francs."

According to the Red Cross, it hopes to have the archive online by 2014, a century after the start of WWI. Those records and today's technology will unlock a piece of history.

There may be more to come, as this careful record-keeping extended through World War II, and to more recent conflicts. There are many more index cards in more boxes on more shelves.

Read the complete story at the link above, and see the video on the same page which covers Barton working with the records.

Philly 2009: Film Festival

The annual Jewish Genealogy Film Festival, screening some 40 films, will be a highlight of this summer's 29th IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy. Films will be shown from Sunday-Friday, August 2-7.

"I'm excited that so many filmmakers are coming through to talk about their films at the conference," writes festival coordinator Pamela Weisberger in an email . "A lot of these films are very new and Philadelphia premieres to boot!"

Although film selection and scheduling is still underway, Pam wants to let Tracing the Tribe's readers know about already confirmed films and filmmakers. This year's edition will span the globe, covering a diverse range of topics, locales and Jewish historical periods.

Here's a preview:

"The Tree of Life" - A personal family saga that illuminates the fascinating history of the Jewish people of Italy, following Israeli-born director, Hava Volterra, as she travels from the U.S. to Italy to trace the roots of her family tree. She digs up rare historical manuscripts linking her to the da Volterra filmy of banks in Florence of the Medici, Ramhal, a Venetian rabbi and mystic involved in the Kabbalah, Luigi Luzzatti, Italy's first Jewish prime minister, and back to New York's own mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. Volterra will be present to discuss her film.

"The Longing: The Forgotten Jews of South America" - A small group of South Americans long to affirm their faith. Their ancestors, European Jews, were forced to convert during the Spanish Inquisition. Isolated in Catholic countries, rejected by local Jewish communities, they battle to become Jews regardless of the consequences. Argentinian-born, producer/director Gabriela Bohm will discuss her film.

"In Search of Bene Israel" - Follows a group of 3,500 Jews in and around Bombay which believes that it was shipwrecked in India 2000 years ago and is in the process of a community-wide migration to Israel. We meet a Jewish Indian filmmaker working in Bollywood, a family who takes care of a rural synagogue, and a young couple on the eve of their marriage and departure for Israel. Director Sadia Shepard will discuss her film and sign DVDs.

"No. 4 Street of Our Lady" - The remarkable, yet little-known, story of Francisca Halamajowa, a Polish-Catholic woman who rescued 16 of her Jewish neighbors during the Holocaust by cleverly passing herself off as a Nazi sympathizer. On the eve of World War II, more than 6,000 Jews lived in Sokal, a small town in Eastern Poland, formerly Galicia and now part of Ukraine. By the end of the war, only about 30 had survived, half of them rescued by Halamajowa. The film draws on excerpts from a diary kept by one of the survivors, Moshe Maltz, whose granddaughter produced the film. The film's Lviv-based researcher Alex Denishenko will be present to discuss it.

"Philly Hoops: The SPHAS & Warriors" - A look back at the first two professional basketball in the city of Philadelphia that were both owned and operated by Eddie Gotlieb "the mogul of basketball." Producer Jim Rosin will be present to discuss the film and sign DVD copies.

"House of Life" - The story of the old Jewish cemetery in Prague, the site of layer upon layer of buried members of the once-vibrant Jewish community. Almost a million people from all over the world now visit the cemetery each year, and the film chronicles its history, which is rich in lore, mysticism, tradition and philosophy. Tales of great rabbis and philanthropists and the story of the giant golem, created from clay to protect the Jewish people, are narrated by Claire Bloom. Producer Mark Podwal will discuss the film. He is best known for his drawings on The New York Times OP-ED page and as an author and book illustrator, exhibited in museums throughout the world.

"Horodok - A Shtetl's Story 1920-1945" - This is the story of vibrant life in an Eastern European Jewish village, before WWII, told by partisan-survivors, who moved to Israel after the war. Horodok was in Poland prior to 1939; then in Russia; invaded by the Nazi's in 1941 and included into Belarus after the war. The film covers the shtetl's community and religious life; the shtetl economy; Jewish and secular education; the flourishing Zionist youth movements and political parties; the background story of an early 1930's film of the shtetl; Russian and Nazi occupation; the creation of the Ghetto and Nazi slaughter; Horodok partisans and the end-of-the-war revenge.

"The Rise and Fall of the Borsht Belt" - At is peak, 1 million New York Jews spent their summers in the Borscht Belt, the birthplace of Jewish-American iconoclastic humor. Many of us spent time there during the 1950s and 60s. This film shows how the Catskills communities were run by women and how class divisions were reflected in the resort hotels: a happy, humane, ironic and bittersweet tale of the past.

"Blessed is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh" - Narrated by Joan Allen, "Blessed Is the Match" is the first documentary feature about Hannah Senesh, the World War II-era poet and diarist who became a paratrooper, resistance fighter, and modern-day Joan of Arc. Safe in Palestine in 1944, Senesh joined a mission to rescue Jews in her native Hungary. Shockingly, it was the only military rescue mission for Jews during the Holocaust. Through Senesh’s diary entries and poetry, her correspondence with her mother, and unprecedented access to the Senesh family archive, this film looks back on the life of a uniquely talented and complex young woman who came of age in a world descending into madness.

"My Mexican Shiva"- Set in Polanco, a Jewish quarter of Mexico City, and spoken in Spanish, Yiddish and Hebrew, this is a dramatic comedy about how the death of a man results in the celebration of his life.

"Toyland" - The 2008 Oscar-winning short subject film : Winter 1942. A small town in Germany. Despite her good neighborly relations with the Silbersteins, Marianne Meissner has certain difficulties to be really behind them in those dangerous times. Marianne’s son Heinrich entertains a close friendship with David, the son of the Silbersteins, whose deportation is imminent. What can Marianne tell her son? For his sake in order to protect him she tries to make him believe that the neighbors are going on a journey to "Toyland." When he hears this, he's envious...and runs off to join them.

"Against the Tide" - Human lives sold for $50. Rabbis marching on Washington. Epic battles between American Jewish communities. These are just three of the realities documented with finesse in this Dustin Hoffman-narrated documentary which addresses the attitudes of President Roosevelt and his senior advisors, who used the pretext of winning the war against the Nazis to block any Jewish immigration to the U.S. and juxtaposes the events in America with heart-wrenching heroic stories of the doomed Jews of Europe and the leaders of Polish Jewry who had faith that their powerful brothers and sisters in the United States would somehow be able to save them.

"Vienna's Lost Daughters" - Anita, Dorit, Eva, Hennie, Lizzy, Susanne, Susy und Rosalie live in New York, where they have started families and built up lives. “Vienna’s lost daughters” grew up Jewish in Vienna and had to flee suddenly in 1938/39. Director Mirjam Unger encounters them with impressive openness and emotion, providing insight into and a look back at extremely personal areas of their lives as they open the doors to their pasts in Vienna—a Vienna that lives on in New York.

"On Moral Grounds" - The story of former Uzhgorod, Czechoslovakia resident, Adolf Stern, who wouldn't take no for an answer and battled the giant insurance company, Generali, in court for not giving Holocaust survivors what they rightfully deserved under their policies. His daughter, attorney Lisa Stern teamed up with attorney William Shernoff to win a landmark settlement that resulted in a US $5.2 billion fund that German companies established to pay reparations to the Holocaust survivors.

The complete film list and schedule will be available online in a few weeks. Tracing the Tribe will post updates as more films and filmmakers are confirmed.

Philadelphia: Prison synagogue restored

The infamous Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia closed in 1970 after a 142-year history.

From 1924 until the prison closed, it also housed a synagogue for Jewish inmates, now restored. It is believed to have been the first synagogue in a US prison.

The synagogue, created from an exercise yard, was rediscovered by University of Pennsylvania graduate student Laura Mass, who based her 2004 thesis on it. She discovered artifacts in the abandoned room such as holiday song book pages.

Adjacent to the synagogue, another exercise yard is now a museum on prison Jewish life, demonstrating the renovation and marking contributions of volunteers who helped sustain Judaism in the prison.

The New York Times detailed this bit of history here.

Water damage had rotted the wood of the ark, where Torah scrolls are traditionally kept, and destroyed plasterwork, including the ceiling's Star of David.

Now the synagogue, the Alfred W. Fleisher Memorial Synagogue, has been restored as a vital part of the 142-year history of the prison, which is a National Historic Landmark and is open to the public. The synagogue was named after its founder, a Jewish philanthropist who was president of the prison’s trustees in the 1920s.

Following the renovation, the 31-by-17-foot room features an ark, reading table, benches and a Star of David on the ceiling. The project, funded by private donations, ran about $230,000. It will be dedicated Wednesday and will become part of the prison's public tours, but will not be used for regular services.

Prior to 1913, all prisoners were in solitary confinement. A remnant of those days is seen in the synagogue, where a bench back can be lowered to reveal a wall with three low doors where inmates could enter individual exercise yards for an hour a day.

Left unrestored is the narrow kitchen where Jewish holiday kosher foods were brought in and prepared. It was left in its abandoned state so visitors can see what the space looked like before renovation.

The prison's last Jewish chaplain, Rabbi Martin Rubenstein, said the synagogue helped inmates stay connected to their families and Jewish tradition. It was the only religious space in the prison without a guard because the Jewish inmates were well-behaved during services. He added that the inmates offered to donate their prison wages to Israel during the 1967 Six-Day War.

Read the complete story at the link above.

There's also a link to a 1993 story about another Pennsylvania prison synagogue in the State Correctional Institution at Graterford.

Philly 2009: Program now online

Tracing the Tribe readers have been waiting impatiently - So here it is! The Philly 2009 preliminary conference program is now online.

This year's offerings indicate a strong, excellent and diverse program with lots of somethings for everyone, from beginners to advanced researchers. Programming starts at 9am on Sunday and runs through mid-day Friday.

Our hardest job will be choosing which program to attend in each time slot. Multiple opportunities are offered at the same time; many appear to be new topics. The program committee has done a great job!

What are you waiting for? Register now and spend a week learning, networking and sharing information. Click here for all details.

The 29th IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy is set for Sunday-Friday, August 2-7, in Philadelphia.

Will this be your first conference? Afraid you might feel lost among all the experts? Don't worry - there are special activities for newcomers to the conference and genealogy beginners. Check out the beginner's track of basics, workshops and the popular Breakfast with the Experts (fee).

Sunday night kicks off with Father Patrick Desbois. Brandeis University Professor Jonathan Sarna will speak twice on Monday, sponsored by Philadelphia's National Museum of American Jewish History. His talks will be "Jewish Settlement Patterns in the US: Why Jews Ended Up Where They Did" and, in the evening, "An Old Faith in the New World: 350 Years of American Judaism."

The annual JewishGen program takes center stage Tuesday evening, as we see previews of future developments and projects, followed by Jewish Genealogy Game Night, produced by the team of Ron Arons and Pamela Weisberger. We're looking forward to Family Feud as such possible teams as Litvaks vs Galitzianers or Ashkenazim vs Sephardim battle it out.

Wednesday evening's program is still being detailed. Watch for announcements.

Among the first-time-ever events is the participation of Dorin Dobrincu, Director General of the National Archives of Romania, while Olga Muzychuk from the State Committee on Archives of Ukraine will speak for the first time since the New York conference in 2006.

A new track offers sessions on the history and food of the Jews of Turkey, and how Jewish traders impacted how we eat. There will also be a two-hour workshop (fee) to explore Turkish, Syrian and Ashkenazi-Italkeni recipes.

The DNA and genetic genealogy track offers new topics, and do look at the numerous Internet and technology sessions, as well as hands-on workshops (fee).

Don't forget the special interest group (SIG) luncheons (fee). This year the line up includes JRI-Poland, Gesher Galicia, Litvak SIG, Belarus, Latvia, Austria-Czech, Rom-SIG, Hungarian SIG, GerSIG and Ukraine. Some sell-out quickly, so sign up as soon as possible.

Other SIGs include French SIG, UK SIG, Southern Africa, Danzig/Gdansk, and Bialygen (Bialystok area), in addition to Birds of a Feather (BOF) and Research Groups. A record number of these will meet this year, including Ostrow Mazowiecka, Boryslaw-Drohobycz-Sambor-Stary-Sambor, Canada, Kobrin Uyezd, Suwalki/Lomza, Kremenets, Rokiskis-Kupiskis, Belchatow (Poland), Southern New Jersey Agricultural Colonies, Suchostaw Region, Jewish Polesie (Belarus), Lublin, Zamosc, Slutsk (Belarus), Lodz Area (Poland), Yiddish Theater & Vaudeville, Krakow, Paterson NJ, Lida, Kolbuszowa Region, JewishGen Yizkor Book Project, JewishGen ShtetLinks and Newsletter Editors.

Remember this is the preliminary program and some changes may occur in the final edition, such as some time changes or additional events added.

Tracing the Tribe will see you in Philadelphia!

The wonderful world of strange book titles

Are we in the silly season yet?

Ever wonder about book titles? Dream about strange ones in your sleep? If you do, then write up a book to go along with the weird title and enter this contest. Start planning for next year!

Bookseller magazine in the UK sponsors the annual Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year, as detailed here in the New York Times.

The winner was “The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-Milligram Containers of Fromage Frais” with runner-ups “Curbside Consultation of the Colon,” “The Large Sieve and Its Applications,” “Strip and Knit With Style” and “Techniques for Corrosion Monitoring.”

I'm sure "Strip and Knit With Style" gave the British judges some giggles, even though this "strip" means cutting fabrics into strips and knitting with the strips.

The Diagram Prize began in 1978 as a way for Bruce Robertson, co-founder of the Diagram Group, an information and graphics company based in London, to combat his ennui at the Frankfurt Book Fair. That was a bumper year for odd titles — nominees included “100 Years of British Retail Catering” and “50 New Poodle Grooming Styles” — but the runaway winner was “Proceedings of the Second International Symposium on Nude Mice.”

Are we seeing a pattern here, with "strip" and "nude"?

In 2005, the winner was “People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It.” Genealogists want to know how we can ask them questions - and get the answers - about our ancestors.

Other past winners:

“Versailles: The View From Sweden” (Is that like seeing Russia from Alaska?)
“Weeds in a Changing World”
“Reusing Old Graves” At last, something for genealogists.

Past titles that didn't make the cut:

“A Pictorial Book of Tongue Coatings”
“Sex After Death”
“Waterproofing Your Child”
“Cheese Problems Solved”

The rules are pretty simple:

Publishers are not allowed to nominate their own books, so as to prevent them from giving books willfully odd names. That is pretty much the only rule. Anyone can nominate a title, and the public is invited to vote online at thebookseller.com.The prize’s administrators try not to read the books, Mr. Stone said, because doing so might “cloud our judgment.”

Bookseller also held last year's Diagram of Diagrams competition, a take-off on the Booker Prize's Booker of Bookers, for the best of all time. The Diagram went to “Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers.” I can't even imagine what that's about. Are they cancelling the postmen? Is this like cancelling a stamp? How do the postmen fit in those machines?

In 1992, “How to Avoid Huge Ships,” by an old sea captain, garnered the award. It is listed on Amazon, and one tongue-in-cheek reader commented that he wished it had included more tips on differentiating between huge and less huge ships, so readers could be sure “what size of ship they were avoiding.”

Read the complete article at the link above.

Holocaust memoirs: Mocking the fakers?

With the recent forensic exposure of fake Holocaust memoirs, we knew the following might happen somewhere, sometime.

A magazine's competition announcement for a fake Holocaust memoir is hammered by readers who seem to feel that those now-discredited authors of published - and very fake - memoirs, should be treated with the same sensitivity as the millions who perished. The commenters felt that mocking the fakers mocks those memories.

When I first read about it at JTA, I really wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry, but I checked out Heeb magazine's postings.

Remember that the hoaxers cheated not only the public - who wanted to believe - but publishers who didn't check things out.

The announcement of the magazine's contest starts:

To be sure, false Holocaust memoirs are hardly a recent phenomenon (Next time, Art Spiegelman, do a little research—there was no concentration camp called "Mauschwitz."). But in recent years, they seem to have become both more common and more crappy. It’s no longer enough to simply say you were in a concentration camp, like Fauxlocaust survivor Benjamin Wilkomirski. No, now you need to have been led across Europe by wolves, or have a chance encounter years later that results in your marriage to the hidden Jewish girl who saved you. Bad enough that these assorted frauds and lunatics should spew this nonsense, but do they have to do such a bad job of it? Have they no shame?

The answer, of course, is that they don’t. And so while the rest of the world may turn away or offer the occasional book deal, we cannot remain silent (much less offer a book deal). What we can — no, must — do, is confront this dangerous trend the only way we know how — with a self-aggrandizing and somewhat offensive publicity stunt.

And thus, we unveil the Heeb Magazine Fake Holocaust Memoir Competition. Simply write a fake Holocaust Memoir recounting your tale of Holocaust survival, get it to us by April 1, and let us do the rest ...

After receiving numerous indignant comments as to the insensitivity of the competition, Heeb's humor editor countered with this:

... Now, I can understand why people would be upset if we were holding a competition that mocked Holocaust memoirs. But — and the competition rules make this pretty explicit to anyone with 3rd grade reading skills and a 10th grade sense of humor — we are making fun of fake Holocaust memoirs. So will somebody please explain to me why this would be so offensive? Did your grandfather survive the fake Holocaust? Did your fake family members perish in fake concentration camps? Were you inspired as a child by stories of fake bravery in the fake ghetto uprising? Perhaps the haters aren’t really haters — maybe they’re just faking it?

He asks how the contest jeopardizes the Jewish people and how the memory of millions of murdered Jews will be lessened by ridiculing the frauds who did write fake memoirs. The Holocaust is part of history and we should remember what happened, he writes, adding that remembering is not the same as reverence.

If somebody wrote a memoir saying that on D-Day, he had invaded Normandy on the back of a dolphin, people would think he was a lunatic. But Misha Defonseca writes deranged nonsense about traveling halfway across Europe with a pack of wolves to find her parents in the Warsaw Ghetto, and it’s translated into 18 languages. And she wasn’t able to do this because of Heeb Magazine going too far with its "irreverence"; she was able to do this because of all the people out there who — well intentioned as they may be (and I’m certainly more generous to them than they are to me) — are so monomaniacal that as soon as they hear the word "Holocaust" immediately shut off those parts of their brain that function critically, and begin to emotionally genuflect.

Read the complete pieces at the links above, and peruse the reader comments. The contest rules (scroll down on this page) sound like Chris Dunham of The Genealogue had a hand in writing them. (see rules 4, 7, 8, 9, 13 and 15).

What do you think?

And, if you are planning to enter the contest, the deadline is April 1, which seems a good day for something like this.

Washington DC: American immigration conference, July 6-31

The National Endowment for the Humanities will sponsor a four-week National History Center summer institute - American Immigration Revisited - based mainly at the Library of Congress, from July 6-31, in Washington DC.

Although I've just learned about this program - and the application deadline was March 2 - I'm informing readers just in case. Occasionally, deadlines are extended, and if you are interested in attending, it will be worthwhile to contact the NEH or keep it in mind for next year if another is scheduled.

Locations will include mainly the Library of Congress, as well as many other museums, sites, archives and centers in the area. Three days will also be spent in New York City, visiting Ellis and Liberty Islands, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, Little Italy and other ethnic neighborhoods.

Each week will focus on a major theme through lectures, discussions and workshops: “Migration in the 19th and 20th Centuries: A Global Phenomenon”; “Migrations between Cultures: A Perennial Issue”; “Changes in American Immigration Policy and Law”; and “Doing American Immigration History: Approaches and Resources.”

Directors and faculty of teacher-scholars are experts in immigration history, ethnic studies, women’s studies, and global studies. Attendees will be 25 women and men who teach at two- and four-year colleges, or who work as librarians, archivists or independent researchers and scholars.

The program is looking for representatives of many disciplines, diverse interests, backgrounds and approaches to teaching and learning. Applicants are encouraged from among those who teach survey classes, deal with immigration and also those who teach immigrant and refugee students.

We are looking for collaborative, hard-working people, who are eager to assemble learning resources, create new curricula, produce journal articles, or creative pieces of literature or art during and following our sessions.

Applicants can propose research projects for new interest areas or further research on projects already begun.

We anticipate the projects will cover a wide range, among them: building immigration courses or websites; designing interdisciplinary learning programs focusing on immigration; researching and writing on immigrant workers, artists, entertainers, or storytellers; developing annotated bibliographies on immigration topics; mapping immigrant communities; examining select immigration laws and regulations; studying particular immigrant women’s groups; or investigating the intergenerational differences, tensions, or cultural changes in particular immigrant communities.

The program includes lectures, panels, discussions, informal exchanges, site visits, and a “Tuesday Evening Immigration Film Festival.” Four basic areas will be explored: American immigration as part of a global phenomenon; migrations between cultures; changes in immigration law, policy, and practice; and approaches and resources for teaching immigration history.

Links for immigration resources include the LOC's Immigration: The Changing Face of America, Smithsonian’s museums, and the National Archives.

For more application information, click here.

Austria: Early Jewish settlement evidence

Our people are nothing if not travelers. Interesting objects show up in the strangest of places, inscribed in unusual languages. Once again, we need to look back and see who our ancestors were and where they lived.

A gold amulet inscribed with an essential Jewish prayer was found in a 3rd-century CE grave in Halbturn, Austria. The grave was that of a Roman child.

This amulet shows that people of Jewish faith lived in what is today Austria since the Roman Empire. Up to now, the earliest evidence of a Jewish presence within the borders of Austria has been letters from the 9th century CE. In the areas of the Roman province of Pannonia that are now part of Hungary, Croatia and Serbia, gravestones and small finds attest to Jewish inhabitants even in antiquity.

Jews have been settling in all parts of the ancient world at the latest since the 3rd century BCE. Particularly following the second Jewish Revolt against the Roman Empire, the victorious Romans sold large numbers of Jews as slaves to all corners of the empire. This, coupled with voluntary migration, is how Jews also might have come to present-day Austria.

As described in this ScienceDaily.com article, the inscription was at first incomprehensible because it was in Hebrew, transcribed in Greek characters: ΣΥΜΑ ΙΣΤΡΑΗΛ ΑΔΩNΕ ΕΛΩΗ ΑΔΩN Α - Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is one.

The amulet (there's an image of it at the link above) was discovered in 2006 by Nives Doneus from the Institute for Prehistory and Early History of the University of Vienna.

The one or two year old child, which presumably wore the silver amulet capsule around its neck, was buried in one of around 300 graves in a Roman cemetery which dates back to the 2nd to 5th century CE and is situated next to a Roman estate ("villa rustica"). This estate was an agricultural enterprise that provided food for the surrounding Roman towns (Carnuntum, Györ, Sopron).

The gravesite, discovered in 1986, has yielded more than 10,000 finds, including glass, ceramic and metal.

Other amulets have been found. This one, according to the article, is different because of its Jewish relevance. Tthe others had magical texts and other wording to protect against such demons as Antaura, which causes migraines.

The amulet will be displayed in an exhibit at the Burgenland State Museum (Eisenstadt, Austria) from April 11.

Read the complete article at the link above.

California: Jamboree program now online

The Southern California Genealogical Society has placed the 40th Jamboree program online . This great regional conference takes place Friday-Sunday, June 26-28, in Burbank, California.

There are more than 100 diverse programs, more than 50 speakers.

Of course, there's the Son of Blogger panel on Saturday morning and a Facebook F2F (face-to-face) get-together on Saturday evening.

Click on the program link for details on presentations, speaker bios, updates and snailmail registration form. Go to the society website for online registration.

There are some special workshops, such as Maureen Taylor's two-hour photo workshop, that will sell out early. If that's one you want to attend, register online ASAP.

Those already registered will soon receive a snailmail printed program. Attendees registering by the early bird deadline (May 14) will receive both the print and CD version of the syllabus.

SCGS is always on the creative edge - that goes for publicity also. Their mailing list includes all SCGS members, past Jamboree attendees and other sources. If you know someone - relative or friend - who might be interested, click on "Be added to our mailing list" and they'll also get a copy.

To learn all the exciting details as they happen, see the Genealogy Jamboree blog.

The Bagnowka Project: Photos, videos, maps

Here's a look at pre-Holocaust towns in a video created by Tomek Wisniewski from historic footage and photos taken in Eastern European towns and shtetls. His The Bagnowka Project website offers extensive Polish Jewish cemetery information and additional useful links, old pre-war Polish and Eastern European maps.

Thank you to Reeva Kimble of Eugene, Oregon for this pointer to the video and the website.

Among the maps, I found a 1915 view of Suchostaw my maternal grandfather's shtetl, Suchostaw, which has been part of Galicia, Poland, Russia and is now in Ukraine.



The Project has its own YouTube channel with some 25 current videos. I viewed one for the forgotten town of Orla, which Wisniewski says does not appear on any tourist map. Its magnificent synagogue is still standing, unused and ignored, although some preservation work was undertaken in the 1980s. View it here.

The website currently includes 60,000 images and videos from Poland, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine, with galleries on history, culture, cemeteries, synagogues, wooden architecture and more. Users are invited to submit photographs, videos and other information to assist all researchers.

The Bagnowka Project has been set up by a group of historians, linguists, journalists, naturalists and guides, united by a common interest in the history of Poland and the eastern borderlands, and their cultural and ethnic legacy.

Our members include authors, collectors of old photographs and maps, professors of diverse languages, specialists in archival work and genealogy, and people responsible for mounting exhibitions and creating internet sites dealing with these matters.

It is our sincere wish that the passion we share in preserving and disseminating the resources gathered here will inspire our audience to recognize that both the richness and harshness experienced by the varied cultures of Poland must be preserved in order to understand the present and move toward a more peaceful and tolerant future.

This wish again is reflected in the symbol of our project - Bagnówka, three distinct religious cemeteries that today adjoin peacefully in northeastern Poland.

Thank you to Reeva Kimble of Portland, Oregon, for this head's-up.

New York: Viva the Anousim Revolucíon, April 2

A senior rabbinical student at The Jewish Theological Seminary, Juan Mejia, will share his personal journey from his Catholic upbringing in Colombia back to the faith of his Jewish forefathers in Spain, before the Expulsion of the Jews in 1492.

In "Viva La Revolucíon: Furthering the Anusim (Crypto-Jewish)Revolution," Mejia will also discuss the current state of the Crypto-Jewish movement, the widespread phenomenon of Latinos everywhere reconnecting to their Jewish roots, and the challenges they face finding a home in the Jewish mainstream.

The program runs from 7-9pm, Thursday, April 2, at the Manhattan JCC, 334 Amsterdam Avenue. Admission: member, $10; others, $15. For more details or to register, click here.

Film: Vienna's Lost Daughters panel, April 17

"Vienna's Lost Daughters" is a documentary following eight New York women who grew up Jewish in Vienna and who had to flee in 1938-39.

The film deals with the women as they attempt to create normality over time, illustrating how memory is manifested across generations. It is a sensitive study of the "survival guilt" over being torn from Austrian culture, showing the women's reminiscences of a happy childhood, how they managed to keep Vienna living on in New York, and the legacy they've passed on to their children and grandchildren.

On April 17, the eight women and the crew will participate in a post-screening discussion., while on April 19 - Holocaust Memorial Day - there will be a post-screening discussion. For more details, see the film's website.


See the film's website for more information. Click "The Women" to learn more about each of the women: Rosalie Berezow, Anita Nagel Weisbord, Hennie Edelman, Susanne Perl, Alice "Lizzy" Winkler, Susy Orne, Eva Franzi Yachnes and Dorit Bader Whiteman.

Perl is the mother of Jewish Genealogical Society of New York member Marty Perl, who wrote "A Family Journey Back to Vienna," in the society's spring 2007 issue of its excellent journal, Dorot.

Click here to learn more about their lives and the film, and to read the words of director Mirjam Unger. Here's an excerpt of what Unger wrote:

I was extremely grateful to meet Vienna’s lost daughters. They made it possible for me to comprehend the horror of what happened as if I had been there, and then they told and showed me how in spite of their losses and humiliations they found the strength and courage to proudly and with determination get a foothold on another continent, in a foreign country, in the strange city of New York, and grow old there with dignity.

Now that the script, shooting and editing are finished and I’ve returned to everyday life with my family and children and Jewish roots, I’ve noticed how much the women in the film gave me. The greatness of their gift becomes obvious in many little things. The fact that family is the most important thing in life. The fact that, no matter what happens, people will never stop hoping, cooking and laughing. The fact that morning will always come.

The fact that children and grandchildren wipe away history and erase guilt, just because they’re born later. The fact that, on the other hand, history’s passed on invisibly, and the next generation will deal with all the things the previous one didn’t or wasn’t able to. And the fact that everything’s a matter of luck, which doesn’t mean you have to sit back and passively watch it happen, “at least you have to keep trying...”

The Manhattan showing will run from April 17-23, at the Village East Cinema.

A guide to Jewish genetic diseases

Moment magazine launched JewishHealth: Your Guide to Intelligent Living in its April issue:

Use this guide to stay informed about a wide spectrum of issues that may affect you and your family. In this first edition, we focus on rare genetic diseases that occur more often in Jews of Ashkenazi and Sephardic descent than in the general population.

Genetic mutations involving these conditions occur when a child inherits two recessive genes - one from the father, one from the mother. Today, tests can determine if parents carry these genes, and prenatal testing is possible for all the conditions on the list in the article.

Extensive Jewish community testing since the 1970s for just one genetic condition - Tay-Sachs - has nearly eradicated it. Professionals hope that testing for the others can achieve the same results.

The Ashkenazim are generally considered to have lived in Western - Central - Eastern Europe, while Sephardim can be traced to Iberia, North Africa and the Mediterranean (Greece, Italy, etc.). Tracing the Tribe also reminds readers that Sephardic communities existed alongside Ashkenazi communities in many locations; marriages between the two communities inevitably occurred.

While many Jewish families do not know their true origins, as evidenced by various genetic genealogy DNA projects, the facts of Jewish history through the ages also indicates that many non-Jewish families today are not aware of their roots following persecutions, forced conversions and assimilation.

Other professionals have said that genetics counselors may not know enough about Jewish history and migration patterns and should know more.

Most Jewish genealogists know that Jewish Records Indexing-Poland was begun by one man whose family carries an unusual blood condition - possibly fatal if treated in the wrong way - and wanted to let others - whose ancestors come from the same area - know about the possibility. What is amazing is that this same rare mutation has also been found in non-Ashkenazi families. Such cases raise interest in who our ancestors really were and our true origins.

Check out the article link above for more information on these genetic diseases. For even more information, simply Google the name of each and find many websites with extensive information.

ASHKENAZI GENETIC DISEASES

Cystic Fibrosis
Crohn’s Disease
Bloom Syndrome
Canavan Disease
Familial Dysautonomia
Fanconi Anemia Type C
Gaucher Disease, Type 1
Mucolipidosis (ML IV)
Neimann-Pick Disease
Tay-Sachs Disease
Torsion Dystonia

SEPHARDIC GENETIC DISEASES

Beta-Thalassemia
Familial Mediterranean Fever
Glucose-6-Phosphate Dehydrogenase Deficiency (G6PD)
Glycogen Storage Disease, Type III (Cori’s Disease, Forbes Disease)

You owe it to yourself and your descendants to check out your own family health histories.

Read the complete article at the link above.

Food: A taste of heritage

In Jerusalem, they lined up for a taste of Grandma's cooking on Sunday at the first Festival of the Jerusalem Pot.

Trying to get a precise recipe from one of Jerusalem's elderly cooks is impossible - they have neither specific quantities nor cooking times.

"It's simple," says Rachel Guate, who was preparing a couscous and a black-eyed pea dish, delicacies from her native Tripoli that are much more complex than this description would imply.

The cooking process will have to remain a mystery. When asked, Guate listed only some of the ingredients: white beans, mangold leaves "ground really well and fried," stuffed intestines, some sort of beef patties that were cooked for hours, made from "beef fat, eggs, semolina, garlic and spices," and couscous.

The festival attracted thousands of hungry residents into the city's Mahane Yehuda market, reported Haaretz.

Some of the most famous home cooks were paired with famous chefs from local restaurants who helped the grandmothers make large quantities of traditional ethnic delights from many communities.

The enormous pots of food sat on improvised tables, while several road shows
offered additional entertainment. Unlike every other food festival that has been
held in recent years, this one offered a rare combination of roots, groove and
even Hassidic robes.

Chefs Keren Kadosh and Tallie Friedman, who organized the festival, visited each of the grandmothers in their own homes, eventually tasting food from 50-60 grandmothers. The event featured dishes from Morocco, Italy, Iran, Poland, Ashkenazi, Jerusalem, Kurdistan and Tripoli (Libya).

Nu? So where's the cookbook? I'd buy one if it were available.

Phoenix: Conversos on stage, through March 29

Along with books and articles detailing the personal experiences and history of Hispanics discovering their Jewish roots, comes a play, "Parted Waters." which will run through March 29 in Phoenix, Arizona.

Commissioned by the Arizona Jewish Theatre Company, the play focuses on three generations of New Mexico Latinos. The grandfather observes his secret religion, the son won't acknowledge it, and the grandson has no clue about a hidden heritage until a family conflict erupts.

Sephardic Jews were forcibly converted to Catholicism during the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal. Many came to the US Southwest, particularly New Mexico, although Crypto-Jews are also found in Spain, Portugal and Latin America. Some families have preserved considerable knowledge and documents, continue to secretly observe Sephardic traditions and teach their children, while others have only a vague idea of their roots.

Playwright Robert Benjamin, of Los Alamos, New Mexico, did extensive research on crypto-Judaism in his state, as detailed in this Arizona Republic story.

"What surprised me was how much of a spectrum there is of experiences," he says. "There are people who embrace it, there are people for whom it is a curiosity, and other people for whom it is a life-changing experience" to discover something so unexpected about their family history.

The central theme is identity, Benjamin says.

"The point I try to make is that people need to think about their cultural identity and make choices," he says. "It's not necessarily a given."

Rabbi Yosef Garcia of Avdey Torah Haya, a Chandler, Arizona synagogue for Spanish-speaking Jews, says the situation is confusing for many hidden Jews because they don't find out until they're adults, when they hear their parents - on their deathbeds - say the family is Jewish.

Of Spanish and Portuguese descent, Garcia was born in the US and raised as a Catholic in Panama. When priests couldn't answer the altar boy's questions, he walked away from the religion at age 13. As an adult, and believing in God, he began studying Hebrew to understand the Bible better. The language came easily to him, almost as if he was Jewish.

At a family wedding, he told his great-uncle, and was stunned by the man's comment: "And he said, Well, we are Jews," Garcia recalls. "I had no idea. You could have knocked me over with a feather."

Garcia's congregation conducts services in Hebrew with instruction in Spanish, and its members are mostly Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Jews from such countries as El Salvador, Cuba, Puerto Rico or Mexico.

He is a member of the Association of Crypto-Jews of America, dedicated to assisting hidden or secret Jews "return" to the the faith of their fathers in a ceremony which is as old as the Inquisition itself. When hidden Jews began arriving in Amsterdam from Spain, well after the 1492 Expulsion, Sephardic rabbinical leaders instituted the ceremony, and also conducted Jewish remarriages, brit milah and education.

Many converso families have very negative feelings about the word "conversion" and feel that Ashkenazi congregations and many rabbis do not understand their history. Those who know their heritage want others to recognize that they have been in hiding. Conversion implies what the Inquisition forced on their ancestors, while a return ceremony is a welcome back after centuries of secrecy.

Shows are at 8pm Thursday-Saturday; 2 and 7pm Sunday, at the Paradise Valley Community College Center for the Performing Arts, 34th Street south of Union Hills Drive, Phoenix. Tickets are $15-40. Call 602-264-0402, or click here.

Jewish Arizona also carried a story on the play with additional insights and pointed to a Nextbook.org review of Yirmiyahu Yovel's book "The Other Within: The Marranos."

Although the book sounds excellent, it is an unfortunate use of the word marrano which is considered pejorative, insulting and worse to Hispanic Jews. Its use in the title perpetuates the idea that it is acceptable to continue to use the word, when most Conversos simply hate it and what it signifies.

An anecdote from the book details the experience of Spanish tourists visiting the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, in New York City. A man murmured a prayer while making the sign of the cross; the tour guide asked him about the prayer.

"Oh, it's an ancient custom in our family," the Spanish tourist replied.

It turns out that the man didn't know what the sounds he was making meant; he only knew that his was a family of "devout Catholics, and on entering a church we say this special benediction as a sign of extra piety."

Research on the part of a Hebrew-speaking friend revealed that what the man was saying was actually shakets teshaktsenu, which is the phrase Moses uses in Deuteronomy when he commands the Israelites to hate idolatry.

In other words, not a Catholic prayer at all, but rather the vestige of a Jewish past so hidden that the man uttering the words did not know what they signified.

Read the complete stories at the links above for a better understanding of the issues.

Los Angeles Area: FHC assisted research, April 5

What was your first genealogy research destination?

When I caught the ancestry bug eons ago, my initial research centered on the Los Angeles Regional Family History Center (FHC) in West Los Angeles. Among the resources I successfully accessed that first day were the Hamburg (Germany) direct and indirect passenger microfilms.

The Jewish Genealogical Society of the Conejo Valley and Ventura County (JGSCV) will meet from 1-5pm, Sunday, April 5, for an assisted research afternoon at the center.

Although the program is is open only to current paid JGSCV members, anyone may join or renew membership at the door ($25 individual, $30 family). The group offers excellent programming at its monthly meetings at Temple Adat Elohim in Thousand Oaks.

JGSCV member experts and FHC volunteers will help participants get the most out of the Center's resources, including assistance with many popular online genealogical databases including Ancestry.com, Footnote.com, Heritage Quest, World Vital Records, Godfrey Memorial Library, among others.

Also available is FHC's extensive microfilm collection including US and international census records, Eastern European and other international and domestic vital records, maps and gazetteers.

Bring research documents and a flash drive to download electronic images of online images; photocopies are also available. There is more information in this PDF handout on preparing for the assisted research afternoon.

Jewish Genealogy Society of Los Angeles librarian and FHC volunteer Barbara Algaze will provide an introduction to the extensive resources.

The center is located at 10741 Santa Monica Blvd. West Los Angeles (on the grounds of the LDS Temple) . Parking is free.

For more details, click JGSCV, or email.

Rivlin family traces 450 years, 50,000 descendants

The Rivlin family, which traces more than 450 years of history, just welcomed its 50,000th member in Jerusalem on March 23, according to the Jerusalem Post. Some 35,000 of the baby's ancestors either previously or currently reside in Israel.

The family has its own website and its genealogy documents 22 generations. The first known family ancestor, Rabbi Yosef of Ovan, lived in Vienna around 1550 and was exiled to Prague.

Among prominent members: the Vilna Gaon (Rabbi Eliyahu of Vilna); Yosef Yoel Rivlin, the author of the first Hebrew-edition Koran; the first female mayor of Israel; several actresses, political figures and TV presenters; and former Knesset speakers Avraham Burg and Reuven Rivlin.

The family also activated its application to the Guinness World Records and hopes to set the record for the world's largest tribe.

In October, the main family event will take place in Jerusalem, when some 5,000 Rivlin relatives will gather to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the family's immigration to Israel in 1809, encouraged by the Vilna Gaon.

The family's first genealogical project was created and maintained by Eliezer Rivlin, who died in 1940.

Family member Reuven Rivlin said:

"Family history is very important to me, and I was brought up knowing the origins of my family. They were the real Zionists at the beginning of the 19th century. I am a Rivlin from my mother and father's side, as they are seventh-generation cousins. My father is a descendent of the Gaon and the mitnagdim [opponents of Hassidism], and my mother is a descendent of the cousin of the Gaon, who was considered to have betrayed the Gaon."

The family continues its genealogical heritage commitment, and the website says.

"It is said that a people who are not acquainted with their past will not have a future. Our family's past history is an impressive one, and it is hoped that its future will be just as great and will not constitute a disappointment to its past."

Read the complete article at the link above.

France: The Pope's Jews in Provence

Author Jules Farber penned a fascinating account, in the Washington Post, of his Provence trip on the trail of the "Pope's Jews." He is the author of Les Juifs du Pape en Provence: Itineraires.

We went through the medieval walls encircling Avignon's ancient heart to experience the cavernous architectural splendor of the 14th-century Palace of the Popes, one of Europe's largest and most important Gothic buildings. This home away from Rome, where seven popes and two antipopes reigned over the Christian world in altera Roma, was, our guide explained, a refuge from feared assassination in tumultuous Rome.

That's when the guide added: "In all that time, the pope's Jews were protected from the belligerent surrounding French kingdom, which expelled them under threat of forced conversion. No Protestants, heretics, agnostics or atheists were permitted in the papal enclave -- only the Jews." Our ears pricked up at this unexpected revelation, and we decided to follow in the footsteps of the papal "chosen people."

Although the Jews were tolerated, they were limited to three trades: secondhand textiles, used furniture (brocante) and money lending. Men wore a yellow rouelle (cloth badge) and women were required to sew yellow fabric to their bonnets.

Farber writes that Jews were restricted to four southern France cities - Avignon, L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, Cavaillon and Carpentras - and to an early form of ghettos called carrieres, where Christian gatekeepers locked the gates at night.

Carpentras was the capital of the Comtat Venaissin region in papal times. It is home to the oldest functioning synagogue in France, dating from 1367, when 20% of the 2,500 residents were Jewish. The town was called La Petite Jerusalem.

Like all congregation members since the 18th-century restoration, we passed under cruciform windows designed by the Christian architect. The open door revealed a surprising burst of Provencal tints of rose, green, blue and yellow, Louis XV-style decoration, chandeliers, classical Greek-inspired columns, faux-marbre walls and carved rose motifs. Unlike in synagogues elsewhere, the rabbi officiated from a pulpit with a baldachin, a kind of canopy, on a balcony above the worshipers.

Farber describes the Comtat synagogue architecture which provided two prayer rooms: a large, beautifully decorated one for men, while, women sat - not in the balcony - hidden in a cave-like underground area. Closed off by a grill, they could not see the service but only hear it. The grill could be lifted only when the Torahs were taken out.

A medieval mikvah fed by a natural spring is underground, and the lowest level houses the bakery with ovens for daily and Shabbat bread with more ovens for coudolles (matzoh, Provencal), which were exported worldwide until the early 20th century.

The Jewish cemetery is about a half-mile from the city center. The popes did not permit visible markers, so tombstones with inscriptions were buried with the deceased for 400 years. In the late 18th century, upright tombstones were permitted.

St. Siffrein Cathedral has a late-15th century southern door known as the Jewish Gate, topped by the Rats' Ball (stone ball with scrambling rats). The congregation's president told Farber that if Jews sought conversion, they could enter near the baptism font and leave by the front door as new Christians - few did.

No one really knows what the strange sculpture means, but there's a legend that the 'Rats' Ball' represents the Catholic Church being bitten by heretics -- Jews, Moors and Cathars." The Carpentras tourism office, on the other hand, says it represents the passage of time eating away at the world.

In Cavaillon, Rue Hebraique is the only original, intact carriere in the region. The synagogue is now a city-owned museum. It was reconstructed in the late 18th century on 15th-century foundations. Like Carpentras, there are two prayer rooms for men, a basement bakery and women's area. The lower levels house the Jewish Comtadin Museum, with books, manuscripts and Judaica, tombstones, Torah Arks and marriage contracts. Objects include an oil lamp with a double menorah from either 1st century BC or BCE, when Romans ruled Provincia (southern Gaul).

Avignon's Place Jerusalem has very tall houses. In crowded ghettos, Jews built up for more space. The city-owned 1348 synagogue was rebuilt after an 1845 fire. Not decorated on the level of Carpentras and Cavaillon, there is still the underground matzoh oven. The original synagogue had prayer and meeting rooms, marriage hall, slaughterhouse/butcher and mikveh.

In L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue - Venice of the Comtat - there are canals and water wheels. The synagogue was almost destroyed by French artillery in 1793 - only the elaborate grill separating men and women during religious services was saved.

Although the "Pope's Jews" were basically prisoners, they survived, practiced their faith and buried their dead. Farber writes that for more than 500 years, religious services ended with a prayer, "petitioning God to 'exalt our sovereign and Holy Father, the pope.'"

There is a companion article with travel, restaurant, hotel and tourist information.

Read the complete article at the link above for much more.

Romania: Blogger receives project grant

Congratulations to fellow blogger Ruth Ellen Gruber who writes the Jewish Heritage Travel blog.

She recently received the Hadassah Brandeis Institute's Michael Hammer Tribute Research Grant. HBI awards 20-30 grants annually in support of academic and artistic projects about Jews and gender.

Ruth's project - (Candle)sticks on Stone: Representing the Woman in Jewish Tombstone Art - focuses on beautifully carved women's tombstones in the Jewish cemetery in Radauti, Romania, where her great-grandmother - Ettel Gruber - is buried.

The tombstones - with candlestick carvings - will be photographed. The images will be combined with historical research, personal reflection and memoir to create an interdisciplinary online gallery and exhibit to be supplemented by anecdotes, literary references and personal stories.

Sabbath candles are a common symbol on the tombstones of Jewish women. This is because lighting the Sabbath candles is one of the three so-called "women's commandments" carried out by female Jews: these also include observing the laws of Niddah separating men from women during their menstrual periods, and that of Challah, or burning a piece of dough when making bread.

She will likely include several other nearby northern Romania towns - Siret, Botosani, Gura Humorului, Suceava - focusing on the same carvings. Ruth plans to set up an additional blog where she will report on the project's progress.

For more information on the project, see Ruth's post.

Take a look at the rest of the 2008 awards at the HBI page under "Scholars and Grants." I learned that our cousin Galeet Dardashti received an Arts award for "Voices of Our Mothers: A Middle Eastern Musical Midrash for Today."

There are many interesting awards that may spur some of dedicated genealogists to propose their own projects. Categories include biography, history, Judaism, Yishuv & Israel, Film & Video, and Arts. Guidelines for the 2009 series will be posted in June.

Identity in the digital age

The Internet brings people together as it helps genealogists access resources to help themselves and others to learn about their ancestors and their own identities.

Tracing the Tribe finds interesting stories in many sources, such as Rabble.ca, which publishes news, features, interviews, commentaries, columns and other items.

Earlier this month, the site published Jewish Identity in the Digital Age - focusing on Jewish identity and genealogy- written by students of the University of Western Ontario's MA journalism program.

Included in this excellent and richly-detailed story are:

-Lukasz Biedka: Psychologist, author, researcher of history and Jewish genealogy, contributor to David Semmel's Prezemysl Blog. For 15 years, Biedka been part of a psychotherapists' team working with Holocaust survivors and the second generation in Poland. His mother was a hidden child.

The Internet provides access to online databases and Jewish genealogy sites where people all over the world can search for a certain place or a certain name, and associate facts more quickly. He's become an expert - "a human database" - on Przemysl's Jews, collecting databases, memories, testimonies, documents and photos and connecting with people online for their shared history.

Those searching for Jewish ancestors, from a culture of secrecy or a recent discovery, it's more than just curiosity - it is searching for identity. The bigger the mystery, the larger the quest for meaning. We are always learning something new.

- Roma Baran: Her story appeared in the Prezemysl blog. Her Jewish parents completely hid their Jewish identity.

After receiving a genealogist's email hinting at her origins, she spoke to relatives, utilized JewishGen and its Family Finder, JRI-Poland and other internet resources to find information and discover the truth.

She is discovering a shared sense of belonging through the Internet, not only connecting with family but with the larger Jewish community and praises generous people for their time and assistance, making contacts, translating or making documents available.

- David Semmel: Creator of the Przezemysl Blog, which aims to bring together descendents of Jews driven out of the town during World War II. He had visited the town as a child with his grandparents and wanted to learn more.

Tech-savvy, he thought using the Internet to help other people with their genealogical research was an obvious choice to help re-establish a Jewish identity once lost or unknown.

- Donna Halper: Teaches communications at Lesley University (Cambridge, MA). She's been teaching Americans about Judaism for years.

The Internet, she says, has just made things possible that wouldn't have been possible in any other time in history. Her story links a Congo man with the Abayudaya Jewish community in Uganda.

- Gary Mokotoff: Award-winning Jewish genealogist, Holocaust specialist, publisher of Jewish genealogy resource books.

He thought the Holocaust was something that happened elsewhere until he traced his family back five generations, found 1,700 descendants of his great-great-great-grandfather, and learned that 400 were murdered.

The Internet he says, plays a significant role in helping Jews make family history discoveries, and cuts down the amount of time necessary to find information by 90%.

These individuals cover the search for identity, Holocaust research, hidden children, secrecy, Jewish outreach, technology, and mention major websites and resources.

Read the complete story here.

It is part of Who R U? An Exploration of Identity at the Edge of Tech, a collaborative feature of the 2008 Online Journalism class, exploring how technology "is changing our identities and our idea of identity." Each of nine episodes will include a feature article, podcast and video segment.

Free genealogy lectures via Skype

Free? Yes, that's what the man said.

The man is Beau Sharbrough, known to many genealogists and family historians as VP of Content at Footnote, although as of November 2008, he is no longer with that site.

However, he is still posting to his blog - "The Unofficial Footnote Blog: An insider blog about the history website, Footnote.com." Of course, after his departure, it isn't as "inside" as it was, but here's his latest blog post, which should be of great interest to our crowd.

Beau is offering free lectures for your genealogy society, using Skype.

Video conferencing may be the biggest boon to international genealogy, and especially to societies located around the world. We are all aware of exactly how much it costs to fly internationally, to stay at a hotel, to eat and the time component and physical wear-and-tear of flying great distances. If we can bring in top-flight speakers via a computer connection, why not?

Here's what Beau wrote on March 22:

You read that right.

For a limited time, in an effort to debug the technique, Beau Sharbrough will speak to your genealogy society (or your genealogical society, if you prefer), for free.

There is a condition. I don’t intend to actually attend the meeting.

I propose to use free software, such as Skype, to video conference.

Preliminary tests, working with my associate, Dick Eastman, have demonstrated that free programs such as Skype and Yugma enable a person to:

- video conference. You can see the speaker, and hear them. The speaker can see you, and hear you.

- The speaker can display his or her desktop, showing a powerpoint “deck,” or demonstrating a software program, or a website.

There is some setup to be undertaken at the remote end. The goal of this introductory offer is to refine the equipment list, setup procedures, and production capabililities needed to implement distance learning in local genealogy groups.

The preliminary requirements for the venue at your end are:

- An internet connection. The faster the better.
- A computer, either PC or Mac.
- A webcam and microphone. I use a Logitech Pro 9000, which does both.
- Skype, a free program, for video conferencing.
- A skype registration, which is also free, is required.
- Yugma, a free program, for displaying the remote desktop.
- A connection between the computer and whatever public address system you have.
- A preliminary technical test is required before an event can be scheduled. A final test is required prior to the event.

Dick and I tested the basic Skype connection as part of the St George Expo in late February. He was in London, England, and I was in St George UT. I was using the internet connection on my mobile 3G modem, which can be good or bad. On that particular day, it was pretty good. Those present could see and hear Dick just fine, and he was able to hear questions from the audience.

Rather than do this for the glory of high tech, I suggest that we could actually present a program with some information of value to your society.

Lecture topics might include:

- Using Footnote.com
- Online Search Assistants
- Genealogy in 2020
- Restoring Family Photos
- What’s new at Ancestry.com
- Planning your trip to the FHL in Salt Lake
- The Genealogy Technology Hall of Fame

Skype is fast becoming a verb, and is widely used. When I logged in today, it said that 15 million people were online.

Get with it. And imagine what you could be doing in a couple of years. You might have monthly meetings, featuring luminary speakers from around the globe, without any travel expense.

Such a journey must start with a single step. I’m proposing this one.

Send an email to sharbrough@gmail.com, if you are interested in exploring this further. I will do five or ten free ones, and then decide what approach to take after that.

I suggest you contact him immediately if your group would like to schedule one of the slots.

Book: Decoding family myths

Although there's no Jewish connection in this book, we know there are universal similarities when it comes to family history, myths and legends.

The family at the heart of Danish author Morten Ramsland's "Doghead" (Thomas Dunne Books) seems like most ordinary families, according to the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune review.

Ugly truths in family histories have a way of getting pasted over with flowery facades; a certain level of denial seems to be required for a clan of people to continue associating with each other through the generations.

But it's not only the bad acts that get mislabeled on the family bookshelf. Long-held grudges, feuds and imagined slights often conceal a sweeter picture than the collective memory has created.

In Morten Ramsland's very popular Danish novel "Doghead," his first to be translated into English, a matriarch's impending death instigates an accounting of all these family myths -- the good and the bad.

And, while the ultimate uncoding of the family's mysteries gets to be a bit of a gimmick, Ramsland's multigenerational family saga is a complex, engrossing tale of unique characters in situations that are sometimes funny, sometimes wrenching, often outrageous and fantastical, but always human and believable.

The narrator returns to Denmark to see his dying grandmother. He and his sister decide to take a look at the family history and its legends. They fill in the holes and investigate the lies, half-truths and misunderstandings of the family.

This sounds like an interesting read for genealogists.

Cape Verde project launched

I first heard about the Cape Verde Jewish Heritage back in 2003, when Carol Castiel spoke extensively about her hopes and plans to promote this project, at that year's International Conference on Jewish Genealogy in Washington, DC.

This week, the Cape Verde Jewish Heritage Project was formally launched by Aziz Mekouar, the Moroccan ambassador to Washington.


Castiel's project, which she has been trying to organize since the 1990s, includes restoration of cemeteries in the former Portuguese colony, writing the community history, descendant interviews and research.

Cape Verde includes 10 islands 300 miles from Africa's west coast. It experienced two immigration waves. The first, in the 15th century, included Conversos, escapees from the Inquisition in Spain. This community is still very secretive and thus the projects focuses on the second wave of immigrants, who came from Morocco in the mid-19th century.

The Cape Verde and Portuguese ambassadors attended the launch. B'nai B'rith helped Castiel, a Voice of America staffer, set up the project. When Castiel was stationed in Portugal she learned about the colony's Jewish history. Although there is no Jewish community today, many of its citizens of Jewish ancestry are proud of their heritage.

Also participating in the launch were Cape Verdean immigrants to the US, who descend from its Jewish immigrants.

Tracing the Tribe has written previously about the Cape Verde project here and here. The International Jewish Cemetery Project also has information, with additional links. A 1996 paper at Saudades.org offers very interesting history. The Cape Verde Project also has a blog and a Facebook page.

Massachusetts: Remembering Dvur Kralove

A Boston suburb synagogue that has held a Czech Torah scroll for 30 years, will hold a memorial to honor 123 Jews of Dvur Kralove who died in Auschwitz-Berkenau. Only recently - thanks to an Internet search - have the names of those souls been recovered.

On April 27, Temple Emanuel in Newton will unveil the names on a Wall of Remembrance, according to this Boston Globe story. To see the names, click here.

Alan Edelstein, 82, chairs the congregation's Holocaust memorial committee and it was his personal journey that led him to the Drur Kralove community.

For 30 years, Edelstein has walked by the Torah, encased in glass, in the synagogue’s lobby. And while he said he felt relief that the Torah escaped Nazi harm, something else pulled at him: Who were the individuals who once read from its scrolls, which contain the Five Books of Moses?

‘‘Walking by it, I felt something was missing, not fulfilling the Torah’s place in our community,’’ said Edelstein, 82, of Waban.

Three years, he embarked on a mission to find the names of those who belonged to the synagogue, where the Torah was once used. His motivation was not personal - he's a second-generation Bostonian - but for Jewish continuity. Edelstein and his wife funded the memorial.

On April 27, the synagogue's youth will read the names of 123 Jews from the town who perished in Auschwitz.

Wayne Goldstein, the director of informal youth education at the synagogue, said the memorial service is meant to ‘‘connect the generations.’’

‘‘The kids pass by [the Torah] every day. They don’t stop and look. Now, we hope there will be real resonance with them,’’ he said.

The Zachor (remember, Hebrew) memorial will list the names, their place of death and their age.

Edelstein's chase began by calling the Czech Embassy three years ago with few results. Then he went to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, with not much more. He sent emails to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.

‘‘I got nowhere fast,’’ said Edelstein. The names of Jewish victims from the town remained a mystery.

An online search connected him to Rabbi Emeritus Norman Patz of Temple Sholom of West Essex, in Cedar Grove, New Jersey, whose congregation also has a Dvur Kralove Torah.

Patz and his wife Naomi published a monograph ‘‘Thus We Remember, ’’ which tells the story of the Dvur Kralove Jews and lists their names.

The rabbi also teaches post-Holocaust thought at Montclair State University in Montclair, New Jersey. He said said Edelstein’s efforts to personalize a Holocaust relic is part of a larger trend in World War II commemorations.

‘‘In the early years, people talked about the huge numbers, the 6 million,’’ said Patz, in an interview from his home in North Caldwell, N.J. ‘‘But there were no names. Today, the development has been in the direction of telling personal stories with people’s names.’’

In 1942, says Susan Boyer, the US director of the London-based Memorial Scrolls Trust, the Czech Jews organized a rescue effort to save the Torahs. The Trust distributes Czech Torahs to institutions through the world.

Fifty Czech Torahs are in Massachusetts, and more than 1,000 in the US, including one at the White House. The organization lends these scrolls on a long-term loan for a donation of 2,500 British pounds. The scrolls must be used at least once a year according to the conditions set. Boyer says they are more than scrolls, they are witnesses to history.

In 1942, one year after the Nazis began mass deportations of Jews from Czechoslovakia, curators at Prague’s Jewish Museum proposed a plan to the Nazis with the hope of preserving Jewish ritual objects from destruction. The Nazis agreed to the plan, although no one knows why, since the Nazi policy was Jewish annihilation.

The result was a substantial collection held at the museum and at more than 40 warehouses around Prague of about 100,000 liturgical items. Among them were five Dvur Kralove Torahs. They remained in Czechoslovakia until 1964, when an art dealer from London orchestrated the purchase en masse of 1,564 Holocaust Torahs from the Communist government of Czechoslovakia.

Drur Kralove's community dates to 1838. Its synagogue was established in 1890 and, by the 1930s, there were 182 Jews within the town's greater population of 16,545.

Read the complete article at the link above.

Blog: This Day in Jewish History

To more fully understand the lives and times of our ancestors, genealogists must be aware of Jewish history throughout the ages and how historical events impacted our ancestors.

One of my must-read blogs that puts Jewish history into perspective is This Day in Jewish History.

For example, today's posting covers events beginning with the 1144 blood libel in Norwich, England; the 1349 massacre of Jews in Fulda, Germany, blamed for the Black Death; 1510 expulsion from Colmar, Germany, where they had lived in the Upper Alsace town for 300 years; 1546 saw an attempt to create a Jewish College in Mantua, Italy.

The listing continues from there, ending with events in 2009.

Everything is archived, so you can easily check a specific date of interest.

The blog is part of the study program for the Jewish History Study Group of Temple Judah, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Mitchell A. Levin is the compiler.

Book: A war story told in hidden letters

A workman finds hidden letters from the past that tell a young man's war-time tale.

Now a book, The Jewish Exponent's literary editor Robert Leiter reviews it here.

In 1997, Manus de Groot, the foreman of a demolition company, was tearing down a house along Amsterdam's Vrolik Street when he found two bundles of letters hidden in the ceiling of the third-floor bathroom. It struck him that the correspondence must be of some importance since there was so much of it -- 86 letters and postcards, and one telegram. They had all been written in a single year, 1942, by Philip Slier, known to friends and family as Flip, from a forced-labor camp. He was just 18 years old at the time, and his correspondence was all directed to his parents.

De Groot read through them and took them to the Dutch National Institute of War Documentation.

The only condition he made was that he eventually be told what had happened to the young man and his family, and if there were any survivors. As the book's publisher and co-annotator, Deborah Slier, states in her introductory remarks to Hidden Letters, this book is de Groot's answer.

Children's book publisher Deborah Slier annotated the letters and her company, Star Bright Books, published it - their first adult title. Slier was also personally involved as Flip was her first cousin; she acquired the letters in 1999. For seven years, Slier and co-annotator Ian Shine tracked down details and annotated the letters. The book contains 86 letters and postcards, maps, documents, and 300 photographs (most taken by Flip).

Slier's father and Flip's father were Amsterdam-born brothers; Slier's father emigrated to South Africa in 1922. Before the war broke out, 56 relatives lived in Amsterdam and other European countries (in addition to Slier's branch). At the end of the war, her family received a letter saying that the Slier brothers, sister and mother had died in camps.

The Germans invaded in May 1940 when Flip was 17. By 1942, Jews were prohibited from nearly all work. Once unemployed, they were sent to some 50 work camps in the Netherlands. Flip was sent to Molengoot camp in spring 1942; one of 7,000 Jews sent to a work camp.

The young man was working as an apprentice typesetter at the daily paper Algemeen Handelsblad. The book's bio says

...he was just about 5 feet, 8 inches tall, weighed 156 pounds, had black hair and gray eyes. "He was a good-natured, gregarious young man who was described by his friend Karel van der Schaarf as brutaal -- that is, audacious."

In April 1943, the Jewish Council ordered him to the Molengoot camp, where he continued to send upbeat letters to his family. He later escapes, knowing that family members had died in Auschwitz. In Amsterdam, he was hidden, obtained false papers, and even saw friends and family occasionally. Arrrested at Amsterdam Central Station, he was sent to another Dutch camp - Vught - and then to Sobibor in Poland, where he was killed.

Writes Leiter:

Flip's extraordinary spirit and the irrepressible nature of his personality come directly through his 86 pieces of correspondence. When you read them, you touch -- and are touched by -- an astonishing individual.

Read the complete review here.

UK: Manchester conference, May 17

The Seventh Northern Conference of the Manchester Regional Group of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain will take place on May 17.

Speakers:

Bill Williams:
Jewish Charities in Manchester: The Jewish Ladies' Visiting Association and how it helped the immigrant community.

Jenny Thomas:
The Making of the BBC Series "Who Do You Think You Are?"

Ian Hartas:
BMDs on the Internet

Ben Forman:
Investigating Your Polish roots: A Personal Journey

Kevin Bolton:
The Manchester Jewish Community Archives at Manchester Central Library

A smaller venue was selected this year, with the capacity for only 50 attendees. If you'd like to attend or want more details about the event, contact Lorna Kay as soon as possible.

Poland: Visiting relatives before the Holocaust

Suchastow and Skalat were the hometowns of the Fink family, my mother's father's family. Once in Austro-Hungary, these Galician towns were then in Poland are today in Ukraine.

The Suchastower Benevolent Society in New York City was very active and my maternal grandfather and his family were active members. As was the case with many of these landsmanshaftn (immigrant societies), the young men who came first and established themselves, welcomed newcomers from home, gave them jobs and got them started in the new world.

One can see the close relationships as the "boys" were often witnesses for each other on their naturalization documents. My grandfather and his brothers were in the building maintenance field and many of the young men began there as window washers before striking out on their own.

About 15 years ago, a short film was found, made by one of the Suchastow boys on his 1930s trip home. The film was discovered, converted to CD. Many Suchastower descendants were fortunate to receive copies. I have one, another copy is at Beth Hatefutsoth in Tel Aviv, and the original - I believe - is in the archives at the Museum of Living Jewish Heritage in New York (the filmmaker's family donated it).

I'm the second generation born in America, so I didn't recognize any of the smiling faces on the Suchastow section of the film. But I recognized the central square of the shtetl and the homes (right, c1930) were strangely reminiscent of the bungalows Grampa built at his Kauneonga Lake bungalow colony in the Catskills (see below, mid-1950s). that looked like shtetl homes.

The colony in Kauneonga also had a central space that looked like Suchastow's, ringed by the now-familiar bungalows. In Kauneonga, however, our central space also contained a playground minus the flocks of geese and goats.


The film also shows the town of Zbarazh, and the filmmaker's sea voyage to Europe and back.
I knew that the Suchastow man had tried to convince others to leave on his trip. They didn't. This short film is the only pre-Holocaust record of their faces, those families, that shtetl.

Today I learned of another documentary - compiled from other amateur home movies - detailed in this Boston Globe story.

Poland—Poland's Jews were nearly wiped out in the Nazi Holocaust, then the communists who ruled the country for decades after World War II waged anti-Semitic campaigns and made Jewish history a taboo topic.

But a new documentary draws on a patchwork of amateur camera footage shot mostly by American Jews visiting relatives in the 1930s in Polish towns and provides a window into what once was.

It makes its debut in Canada, Germany and Ukraine in Polish next month, and an English version will be ready for the U.S. market later this year, Polish producer Miroslaw Bork said Friday.

"Po-Lin, Slivers of Memory" was conceived by Polish camerawoman Jolanta Dylewska, who was inspired to make the 80-minute film after coming across one of the home movies in Jerusalem archives in 1996 while working on an earlier project.

I don't know if our Suchastow footage is included, but I'm trying to find out. There is a short trailer (Polish narration) for Po-Lin here.

The filmmaker said that the movie had enormous emotional value for her, and that people filmed reacted with great warmth because they knew the person filming them.

For those who may not be familiar with the phrase Po-Lin: in Hebrew, it means "you will rest here," or "a place of refuge," but it has become the word for Poland. In the Middle Ages, Jews expelled from other European countries settled there and remained for a thousand years. The pre-Holocaust Jewish population was 3.5 million; only a few hundred thousand survived.

Remembering that short film on Suchastow, I realized - as did Dylewska, that those people had only about a decade to live before the Holocaust began.

The Polish-German product cost some $380,000 and opened in November, playing in Polish cinemas.

After finding the initial home movie, Dylewska found more footage in Israeli and American archives, and added commentary -- based on Jewish history books -- in Polish with English subtitles.

At the same time, she said she took great care to preserve the original atmosphere of the black-and-white films in hope "the viewers will carry these people in their memories."

She also filmed the places from the home movies as they are today, and found witnesses to talk about their former Jewish neighbors and friends.

If the film comes to your city, do see it.

Texas: Kosher Chili Cookoff, March 22

News of a kosher chili cook-off in Dallas is an opportunity to provide a tip on an often overlooked genealogical resource: synagogue newsletters.

Where else but Texas do you find the best kosher chili?

The 16th Tiferet Israel Kosher Chili Cook-off takes place from 11am-4pm, Sunday, March 22, at the Jewish Community Center in Dallas. The annual family event attracts some 3,000 local and national visitors. The event even has its own website and a DVD.

More than 35 local teams will compete for the title. Judges include local and national people, including a first-place National Chili contest winner.

Food traditions are an important part of our lives and, in Texas, chili is very important! The congregation was founded in 1890.

Tiferet Israel Congregation is a unique, synagogue enriched by history, culture, and tradition, which, this year will also be celebrating it's centennial celebration. It is often recognized as the small synagogue with the Big as Texas heart. Known throughout the country for this annual event , it has been cited in many national newspapers, including Jewish Living, and Hadassah magazines.

The DVD of the event (see the website) demonstrates, according to a spokesperson, "how Jews in Texas maintain their Jewish identities in a kosher setting, while whether one keeps kosher or not, serves to unify the Reform, Conservative, Orthodox and unaffiliated in our community while also attracting non-Jews, all who enjoy good, wholesome, family fun and camaraderie - Texas style!"

Other events include children's entertainment, vendors, a silent auction and live music at the Dallas Jewish Community Center. Proceeds go to local institutions and charities.

If chili isn't your thing, hot dogs and felafel with be available!

And file this away in your holiday recipes: Hamantaschen with chocolate caramel pecan filling is on page 3 of the congregation's online HaKol newsletter. This sounds so much better than poppyseed or lekvar!

An often overlooked source of genealogical information, synagogue newsletters contain lists of family events, births, bar/bat mitzvah, marriage and deaths. If you know your family lived in a certain town or belonged to a certain congregation, it may be very useful to contact those congregations for more information.

Case in point: I knew that New York cousins had spent some time in West Virginia a very long time ago. I contacted the rabbi of the only congregation in town and received quite interesting information about the wife, who won most of the cooking awards at the County Fair.

It is always worth a try!

Michigan: Program change for March 22

Just received this from the JGS of Michigan:

Due to speaker Pam Smith's illness, her Sunday, March 22 session on "Advanced Googling for Genealogical Purposes" has been cancelled. The session was to have taken place at the Farmington Hills Holocaust Memorial Center.

This session will be rescheduled. For more details, check the JGSMI website.

Genetics: Breast cancer study - not only Ashkenazi

A New York University study investigating the genetic roots of breast cancer is detailed here, focusing only on Ashkenazi women and ignoring other populations who carry these genes, such as Hispanic women who descend from Converso ancestors who settled the US Southwest.

Despite the fact that some Hispanic women - found to be descendants of Converso families (those forced by the Inquisition to convert to Catholicism in Spain and Portugal) who were early settlers in Colorado, New Mexico and other Southwest states - present with the same gene, and also despite the DNA genetic evidence that a growing number of Ashkenazi families actually have Sephardic roots, I fail to understand why more Sephardic and Hispanic women are not included in these studies.

In fact, the Jewish history of Italy and Sicily might also provide new food for thought in this area.

According to a Smithsonian Magazine article on the San Luis Valley women:

By comparing DNA samples from Jews around the world, scientists have pieced together the origins of the 185delAG mutation. It is ancient. More than 2,000 years ago, among the Hebrew tribes of Palestine, someone's DNA dropped the AG letters at the 185 site. The glitch spread and multiplied in succeeding generations, even as Jews migrated from Palestine to Europe. Ethnic groups tend to have their own distinctive genetic disorders, such as harmful variations of the BRCA1 gene, but because Jews throughout history have often married within their religion, the 185delAG mutation gained a strong foothold in that population. Today, roughly one in 100 Jews carries the harmful form of the gene variant.

The 2001 Colorado cases in San Luis Valley showed that these genes are present in Sephardic populations and are not limited to Ashkenazi women.

New York University is asking only Ashkenazi (Eastern European) women to participate in this nationwide project and to provide a DNA sample. Scientists hope to find genetic mutations that cause women in that population to develop breast and ovarian cancer at a much higher rate than others.

The workshop, "Beyond BRCA1 and BRCA2: The Next Generation of Genetic Discovery" will be offered at other places in the region as researchers attempt to enroll 1,000 women in the study. Women who attend the talk given by the Jewish Women's Breast and Ovarian Cancer Genetics Study at NYU, will also have the opportunity to give a DNA sample.

In the newspaper story, genetic counselor Lauren Carpiniello, who helps run the study, said that the scientists are focusing on women of European Jewish ancestry because they are much more likely than other groups to carry two genetic mutations linked to breast and ovarian cancer, known as BRCA1 and BRCA2, than other populations.

For more information, read the newspaper story, the Smithsonian Magazine link and Tracing the Tribe's previous post.

Luxembourg: Yad Vashem receives Holocaust archive

Yad Vashem has received an archival collection from Luxembourg, detailing the Holocaust’s affect on that country’s Jewish population.

The microfilms were presented Monday evening in Jerusalem by Center for Documentation on World War II director Prof. Paul Dostert, of Luxembourg, to Yad Vashem chair Avner Shalev.

The collection includes some 31,000 pages, covering daily life under German occupation, confiscations, restrictions, lists and orders of deportations to ghettos and concentration camps, as well as information on looted Jewish property, emigration to the US, declaration of Jewish assets, life in the Funfrunnen home for seniors, and information on some 60 mixed-marriage couples who managed to rescue their Jewish spouses

Yad Vashem Archives director Dr. Haim Gertner said more than half of Luxembourg's Jewish population was killed; all suffered persecution. This important collection is an important source for what that community experienced.

Researchers and the public may access the collection onsite at Yad Vashem

Connecticut: Beginning Jewish Genealogy, March 29

The Godfrey Memorial Library in Middletown will host a a free session on beginning Jewish genealogy with experts from the Jewish Genealogical Society of Connecticut.

Starting at 1.30pm, Sunday, March 29, JGSCT members will present the following topics (in order of presentation):

Monica Talmor: How to get started in family history research
Georgia Haken: Ports of entry
Marcia Indianer Meyers: Documents and naturalization papers
Barney Miller: Connecticut resources
Arthur Meyers: Death certificates and cemeteries
Georgia Haken: Using the US Census
Linda Winkelman: Searching for family
Doris Loeb Nabel: Internet search tools and links
Arthur Meyers: What to do with what you find

The JGSCT, which was formed in 1988, also has an extensive library located at the Godfrey Memorial Library; JGSCT members may borrow materials.

Massachusetts: Sephardic weekend, March 20-22

A scholar of medieval and early modern Jewish history, who focuses on medieval Spanish Jews, will be the Temple Emunah (Lexington, MA) scholar-in-residence Friday through Sunday, March 20-22.

Dr. Benjamin Gampel teaches at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, where he holds the Dina and Eli Field Family Chair in Jewish History

Following a year of local archive research in Spain, Gampel was able to recreate some of the long-forgotten history of the Jews of the Iberian Peninsula, in "The Last Jews on Iberian Soil." He edited "Crisis and Creativity in the Sephardic World," (Columbia University Press, 1998), and wrote an essay in "Cultures of the Jews" (ed. David Biale).

Of personal interest to me was the fact that Dr. Gampel returned to Spanish archives for his current project, a book-length treatment of the riots and forced conversions of 1391 on the Iberian Peninsula. Our family believes we left Lerida/Llerida in Catalunya following the 1391 riots that destroyed that particular community. In the Lerida archives, we discovered a document from 1353 with our unusual family name, and several additional documents and index mentions from the early 1390s. I'm looking forward to this new book

Most events during the Glatzer Memorial Weekend are free (there are fees for Friday night dinner and Sunday breakfast) and open to the community. All lectures are free.

Friday begins with a 6pm Carlebach Kabbalat Shabbat, a community dinner and Gampel's 8pm lecture on "Jews, Judaism and the Rise of Islam."

On Shabbat, Gampel will deliver "Sephardic Jewry Comes of Age, How Golden Was It?" during Shachrit services; following Kiddish, he will speak on "Sex, Food and the Lush Garden: Religious Piety Confronts Sensual Pleasure." After Maariv and Havdallah, the talk will be "Gazing into the Countenance of the Divine: Confronting the Riddle of Jewish Apostasy."

The Sunday morning talk is "Crises of Identity in 17th Century Amsterdam: The Case of Barukh Spinoza."

See the event flyer here for more details and reservation forms.

Immigrants: Secret stories, oral histories

Each year, a college assignment reveals secret stories and startling discoveries.

Hunter College sociology professor Nancy Foner requires students in her honor seminar - “The Peopling of New York” - to interview a close relative about the family’s recent history.

Some of the 20 students are spotlighted in this New York Times story, which also provides photos and audio interview samples.

Angela Wu Cen, 19, knew many details about her parents’ 13-year migration from China to Panama to New York. But she had never known much about their courtship.

This year, Aleksandr Akulov, 19, found out that his mother had given up a promising career in mechanical engineering in her native Russia to move to New York, where she found work at a laundromat. Ilirjan Gjonbalaj, 18, discovered that his Albanian parents were smuggled into the country from their home in Montenegro. And Kanushree Jain, 19, learned that her parents were treated with outright hostility in New York by their fellow immigrants from India because they were new arrivals and could not speak English.

Along the way, each student discovered details about the stress, hardship and struggles of immigration.

In a class where most of the students are either immigrants themselves or the children of immigrants, the assignment is not simply an exercise in historical inquiry but also an intense exploration into their own lives and the sacrifices of their forebears.

Foner has written widely about New York immigrants, and says that although there's an image of immigrant kids born and raised in America as being ashamed of their parents, these students are proud of their parents and their experiences.

The stories highlighted cultural issues, discrimination towards newcomers in the same community, illegal immigration, changing professions and upward mobility. The students also learned about their parents' commitment to making a better life.

Some students didn't understand how they could have grown up in their respective families and not known these details.

Read the complete story at the link above.

Newsgroups: A genealogy collection

Do you know how many genealogy newsgroups there are? If you don't, then newsgroup provider NewsDemon.com certainly does and provides free access to them.

Genealogy newsgroups tackle such categories as adoption, general genealogy, local and ethnic group genealogy, miscellaneous, obituaries, military, software and computers, surnames and families by country and by specific name.

Jewish resource newsgroups include soc.genealogy.jewish (moderated Jewish genealogy newsgroup).

Tracing the Tribe has received a press release from NewsDemon.com specifically pointing to an extensive collection of genealogy-related newsgroups, and making research easier with free access to a large offering of topics.

To use newsgroups, you need a Newsreader to download messages. NewsDemon.com offers Newsrover free with membership. See the set-up tutorial here. It also provides a free public server - use the nntp address, login and password found here.

UPDATE: I have attempted to download and install, but am running into problems. I have already heard from NewsDemon support and will inform readers of the solutions. I have also indicated to them that their current black background makes for very difficult reading for many people - me included.

Here's the press release - follow the links for more information.

Genealogy is the study of a family ’s lineage and ancestry. Genealogy covers everything from a family tree to when and how people lived almost a century ago. The word genealogy is derived from the Greek, and means the study of family history and descent.

On Usenet, the objective of genealogical research is to identify ancestors and their family relationships. At a basic level, identifying and recording the family tree by determining such things as date and place of birth, names of parents, date and place of marriage, names of children, and date and place of death.

NewsDemon.com also helps educate USENET users about newsgroups. The site provides a directory of topics and has collected thousands of pages of information about the newsgroups within the topics. When you click on a link, you can drill down deep into a topic until you eventually find the charter for the groups under that topic. A charter is the "set of rules and guidelines" which supposedly govern the users of that group.

Genealogy Research with Usenet Newsgroups With Usenet, genealogy is easier to research than at any other time in history. Despite the large amount of false information online, Usenet and corresponding Newsgroups cater to many legitimate and incredibly valuable genealogy resources available. This helps people who, fifty years ago, would have spent years tracking down family roots do so in months, or even weeks.

Accessing Genealogy on Usenet In order to access these newsgroups, it's required to have access to Usenet. NewsDemon provides a free public server for this purpose. Just use the nntp address, login, and password found here. No strings attached. Although some internet service providers allow free access to these newsgroups, many times messages are incomplete or scrambled, or they only cover a very small timeframe.

It is recommended that a premium Usenet provider such as Newsdemon.com be used, in order to properly access the rich information available on genealogy that Usenet can provide.

Newsdemon.com provides free access to these genealogy newsgroups and paid access to 1000s of other newsgroups, completely uncensored. Additionally, text newsgroups range to about 800-1000 days old. These newsgroups allows members to access messages and follow forum-type conversations more than 2 years old, an important factor when following genealogy topics and conversations.

Secondly, you will need a Newsreader, a client that downloads the messages and organizes them accordingly, to access genealogy newsgroups. With Newsdemon.com Usenet access, Newsrover, an award winning Newsreader is available free with membership. A tutorial on how to set-up Newsrover for Usenet and Newsgroup access is also available. The video tutorial walks the user through installation and set-up of Newsrover.

For more information on the genealogy newsgroups, click on the press release link above and follow the additional links to learn how to access Newsgroups and set up the Newsreader for Outlook Express, Vista and Macs. A tutorial on how to set-up Newsrover for Usenet and Newsgroup access is here.

DNA: The flip side

This WashingtonTimes.com article - "DNA tests help genealogists only so far" - focuses on how DNA testing may provide more questions than answers.

"Testing is only filling in a small segment of the big picture," says Troy Duster, a sociology professor at New York University. "That's part of the problem. Some people feel that maybe knowing a little is better than not knowing anything, but it can provide people with a false sense of connection."

Most of us who utilize DNA tests to investigate our families have learned quite a bit. Whether we now know that a certain branch is not biologically related, or that a family with another name and far-off origin is a genetic match - we have learned something valuable that could not have been done with paper.

Duster says testing takes only biology into account and not affiliation with certain groups by way of language, culture or customs. Of course, he isn't talking about Jewish genetic genealogy and how it links hidden Polish children to their Jewish biological families, or how today's Hispanics carry the Kohanim markers, or even how Ashkenazi Jews are genetic matches with Hispanic and Converso families. I guess we look at things a little differently than does Duster.

Duster also refers to the 2007 case of a Maryland accountant who was tested by several genetic genealogy companies and mistakenly reported to be a Genghis Khan descendant.

"Any company can claim that their laboratories can analyze your DNA to provide accurate information about your ancestry," Mr. Duster says. "But if three different companies provide three different answers [as a report on CBS' "60 Minutes" did in 2007], what is a consumer to do? Which company is correct? There is no way of knowing, since we have no 'gold standard' for excellence or professional self-policing."

However, he neglects to say that FamilyTreeDNA.com was the only one that got it right, and of the others, others got it wrong even after repeated testing.

Quoted in the story are FamilyTreeDNA.com's Max Blankfeld, Ancestry.com's Brett Folkman, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. , author Edward Ball, and the American Society of Human Genetics. The majority of the story seems to focus on the testing limitations of racial and ethnic ancestry.

Read the complete story at the link above.

Barbados: A Jewish historical mystery

A vacation to Barbados leads to an investigation of the Sephardic role on the Caribbean island, according to an article by Alison Stein Wellner.

Wellner tore herself away from the beach and visited one of the oldest synagogues in the hemisphere (see the photos in the story).

While sunlight filtered in through the lancet windows, playing on the chandeliers and intricate wood lattice work on the balcony, I listened as Paul Altman described the island's Jewish history in his island lilt -incongruous from someone who looks a great deal like a younger, more athletic Joe Lieberman. Altman is a second-generation Barbadian, real estate entrepreneur and one of the island's most prominent Jews.

The Jews arrived in the 1640s and were already experts in sugar production in Brazil. The economy back then focused on sugar and its byproduct, rum.

The new Nidhe Israel Museum provides some insight. The Spanish/Portuguese Sephardim were conversos, posing as New Christians in public and Jews in secret. The Inquisition was after them and hiding in plain sight as Christians helped to keep them safe.

Spain claimed the New World, including the Caribbean, but Holland and England allowed the wealthy, internationally-connected and Spanish-hating Conversos to settle in those colonies. In Dutch Brazil, the Jews were in the sugar trade, and when the Portuguese recaptured Brazil in 1654 - expelling the Jews - many went to Barbados. Some others - about two dozen - went off to Nieuw Amsterdam (New York), but that's another story.

Jews called Barbados the land of Coconut Milk and Sugar Cane. They built a synagogue and a mikvah - discovered last year in the synagogue's parking lot by an archaeologist. Some 800 Jews lived there c1750, within a larger population of about 80,000.

Wellner visited the island again a few months later to speak to Dr. Karl Watson, a University of West Indies historian.

Watson's writing a book about the Sephardim. His research includes investigation of business ledgers, minutes of the Synagogue's Mahamad (board of directors), and some 300 Jewish wills (1670-1831). In these records, he sees intimate details of people's lives. Who they left money to, who didn't get any and personal histories.

He speaks of them as if they were his neighbors. "I feel like I know these people, even though they've lived and been gone for over 200 years," he said a bit sheepishly. "Although I'm not Jewish, I go to their graves, I leave a pebble, and I say the one or two lines of kaddish that I know."

Wellner visited today's busy pedestrian mall called Swan Street, once the center of Jewish life, an once known as Jew Street.

According to Watson, most of the land was owned already before the Sephardim arrived, and there were restrictive laws of both land and people. Jews could only own one slave per Jewish person, while major sugar cane production required hundreds of slaves. The restriction ended in 1706, and by then Jews were already active as merchants and traders.

In the museum there's a Jewish life timeline 1600-2000. For 1644-1654, it indicates that "Jews are sugar experts for British settlers." According to Watson, this goes back to the Sephardic sugar plantations in Brazil. The island's planters watched what the Jews were doing and borrowed technology.

In Ian Williams' book Rum(Nation Books, 2005), writes Wellner, James Drax, an elite Barbadian planter with more than 700 acres, visited Brazil in 1640, and brought back two key innovations: a triple-roller sugar mill for crushing sugar cane, and copper cauldrons for boiling cane juice to get crystals. Williams credits the Jews for transferring the technology to Barbados, which they likely did as investors in sugar plantations they did not own. Watson's ledgers show both investments in sugar plantations and certainly, handling the trade in sugar after it was harvested.

She asks Watson about the myth of the Barbados name - the bearded fig tree or bearded people?

"Well. There's this myth that Barbados got its name from Portuguese, who landed here and found bearded men. Some said, well, those were Indians, and some said 'no Indians didn't have beards, this had to be some tribe of Judah, they were Orthodox Jews.' Others say it doesn't refer to humans at all, but the Bearded Fig Tree."

There's much more, so read the complete article and see the images. For more resources on Barbados, click here.

Kosmix: A new web search tool

Today's New York Times had an article about Kosmix.com, described on blogs and news sites as a search engine that may someday rival Google.

I decided to click on the site and see what it said about ... me.

In addition to Tracing the Tribe, International Jewish Graveyard Rabbit, MyHeritage Genealogy Blog, and mentions in media, articles and images, I also learned that a Schelly is a white fish.

The Schelly or common whitefish (Coregonus lavaretus), is a rare and endangered species of freshwater fish, in the whitefish family. It is one of only four species of freshwater fish under the protection of the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981.

I never knew that!

It showed sponsored ads about the Talalay process for latex foam rubber (mattresses and pillows), invented by cousins.

It also provides a list of 16 additional topics for more information:

Jewish History
Jewish Cemeteries
Genealogist
Yad Vashem
Genealogical Society
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
Mogilev
Shtetl
Genetic
Genealogy
Family Tree DNA
The Tribe
Holocaust Victims
Anterograde Tracing
Yizkor
Holocaust
Survivors
Y Chromosome

A click on Mogilev (Belarus) turned up an interesting set of results: geographic information, maps, photographs, videos, articles, a list of nearby shtetls from Wikipedia, and much more information.

Clicking Jewish Cemeteries produced articles, videos, photos, commercial items (books, etc.), Q&A's from several websites.

A search on only the surname Talalay produced links to cousin Paul Talalay of Johns Hopkins University Medical School (of anti-cancer enzymes in broccoli fame), his daughter Rachel Talalay (Tank Girl), daughter Susan Talalay (sportswriter in Florida), and much more, as well as links to my articles and postings.

Equal time for Dardashti was next: Persian carpets, cousin Shai, Photos of cousins Galeet , David, Farid, Hamid/Howard (links to his music) and more. Articles on Sephardim, Mizrahim, Persian Jews. Links to Tracing the Tribe, links to Yahoo Q&As (where is the name Dardashty or Dardashti from?), music videos of cousin David, Jonathan, Galeet, books by cousin Danielle and more.

It was an interesting exercise, and I'm recommending that readers check it out.

I wonder what you'll find. Share what you've found - especially if there was something new that you've never seen before - through comments to this post.

DNA Shoah Project: testing, Holocaust education

The DNA Shoah Project utilizes genetic tools to reunite families separated by the Holocaust, and it has just launched a multimedia curriculum employing genetics to teach high schoolers and adults about the Holocaust. The curriculum is free at the site.

Many Jewish genealogists have heard founder Syd Mandelbaum - the son of survivors and grandson of three who perished at Auschwitz in 1942 - speak about the project which collects genetic DNA - at no cost to participants - from survivors and their direct descendants to help identify Holocaust remains discovered in Europe.

The project's research coordinator Matt Kaplan will speak at 6pm Sunday, March 15, at Houston (Texas) Holocaust Museum, to raise the group's profile and attract more participants. He was interviewed in this Houston Chronicle article.

“The science is the easy part,” Kaplan said. “The hard part is letting people know we’re doing this at all.”

The non-profit project grew from Mandelbaum’s quest to develop a database of the Holocaust’s missing; some 1,000 survivors and descendants have already contributed DNA cheek samples. He was introduced to Dr. Michael Hammer, a University of Arizona geneticist and director of the Genomic Analysis and Technology Core facility within the Arizona Research Laboratories (ARL) Division of Biotechnology. Their meeting and subsequent collaboration created the project.

The new educational learning modules are designed to supplement existing Holocaust education materials already available for humanities, history, and the arts and bring lessons of the Holocaust into the biology classroom.

According to Kaplan, it is important to have historically accurate curricula about the Holocaust. “Our curriculum designers have created a set of learning materials that are both compelling and scrupulously accurate.”

Aimed at high school students and adult learners, the curriculum utilizes the enthusiasm surrounding forensic science and offers a science-based activity with contemporary and historical ramifications.

Introductory activities provide social context and insight into the Holocaust through survivor video testimony; follow-up activities move students into the science behind the project's family reunification efforts.

The lesson culminates with a sample forensic reconstruction and the construction of an unknown DNA profile. Additional materials include annotated teacher’s guides, discussion questions and student worksheets.

“By using science to build the learning activities, we are helping students understand the very same science that will be used to build our project’s genetic database of Holocaust survivors,” Kaplan continued. “We believe the introduction of our curriculum modules is particularly timely since younger people today have a strong interest in forensic science.”

The curriculum materials are free of charge at the website

The cutting-edge science forms the foundation for the project's goal, which is to build a forensic database of genetic information from Holocaust survivors and their immediate descendants in an effort to reunite families torn apart by the Holocaust.

More than 60 years after World War II, thousands of families still seek information about loved ones who disappeared. The project aims to match displaced relatives and provide Holocaust orphans and lost children with information about their biological families.

Aging Holocaust survivors are being lost quickly, so the work is urgent. The goal is to collect as many DNA samples as possible from the international community of survivors and their families.

The DNA Shoah Project is a non-profit, humanitarian effort housed at the University of Arizona with the goal of reuniting families torn apart by the Holocaust. There is no cost to participate. Donations are tax-deductible.

Kaplan says the database may also be used one day to identify the remains of Holocaust victims found in mass graves.

Read the complete article here.

Michigan: Holocaust history mystery, March 18

Growing up in New York City, author Lev Raphael realized his family was different - there were no relatives, no physical history (no photos) and no emotional history.

Tracing the Tribe's readers in Lansing, Michigan have an opportunity to hear author Lev Raphael on Wednesday, March 18, speak about his new book, "My Germany," the most recent of 19 books.

In Germany, traveling by train on a book tour for "The German Money," he says he saw an apparition of his mother on the same journey 60 years earlier. She was a slave laborer in a cattle car going to a munitions factory. His father, from Czechoslovakia, worked as a Russian front forced laborer and was then sent to Bergen-Belsen camp, but the train was stopped by the Allies in 1945, saving his life.

Raphael wanted to know more, but couldn't find anything on it, and began planning his own - a combination memoir/travelogue/ mystery - on his parents’ experiences.

He says the new book represents the Holocaust's dark history and survivors' efforts to start life again. He explains how the journey helped him to both embrace his Jewish heritage and break a generation of silence.

Along the way he found some surprising things, such as his mother had written an account of the Vilnius ghetto liquidation, where she lived. Raphael says he knew nothing about it until he was contacted on the Internet.

Writing the story required his skill both as an academic and as a mystery writer, Raphael was a Michigan State University professor of American thought and language for 13 years before switching to full time writing in 1988.

He visited Germany three times to research the book.

Probably the most dramatic experience in the book comes when Raphael holds his mother’s prisoner’s card in his hand. “It was the actual card they used when she was admitted, processed, in one of the camps,” he said.

Raphael said he was “struck by the very elegant and very striking penmanship she used.” “I was impressed that she kept human dignity with something as small as that,” he said.

He also found immense irony in a line on the card stating that all questions would need to be answered truthfully under threat of punishment. “What punishment would be worse than death?” he asked.

In this article, he claims no one has tried to write such a story which ties all these elements together and which mixes his nice contemporary travels with the reality of camp visits integral to his parents' lives.

He tried to track each story to its end, even though some were "dead ends."

Raphael also knows that this is why so many Holocaust stories are difficult to trace, which was underscored by the recent fraudulent Holocaust story, “Angel at the Fence.” “As soon as I heard the story I knew it was a hoax,” he said. “I was appalled, but Americans love a romantic story.”

Raphael will speak on "My Germany," at 7pm, Wednesday, March 18 at Everybody Reads Books & Stuff, 2019 E. Michigan Ave., Lansing. Read the complete article here.

Italy: Vercelli synagogue restoration project

The Union of Italian Jewish Communities website recently featured an extensive article in Italian on the restoration of the 19th-century synagogue in Vercelli (Piedmont), Italy. The two photos in this posting are from the community website.

Ruth Ellen Gruber's blog - Jewish Heritage Travel - pointed to the article and translated it. She also includes some of her own photos of other European synagogues that were influenced by Vienna's Tempelgasse Synagogue, a source for Vercelli.

The article (read it in Italian, if that's one of your languages) describes the process of restoration for the northern Italian synagogue in Vercelli, located between Milan and Turin. Although nearly abandoned and in very bad condition for years, some work was carried out in 2003 and 2004 and, in 2007, a €700,000 project was begun.

Today, there's a very small Jewish community. Once restored, says president Rossella Bottini Treves says, the building will serve as a city cultural space.

Native-born architect Marco Treves designed the synagogue which was dedicated in 1878. He also designed the Florence synagogue.

With its Moorish-style striping and flat, tripartite facade with a raised central portion, it resembles several important synagogues in Central Europe whose design was inspired by the Tempelgasse synagogue in Vienna, designed by Ludwig von Foerster and built in the 1850s, which was destroyed on Kristallnacht - these include the destroyed synagogue in Zagreb and the Choral Synagogue in Bucharest, among others.

Architectural historian and preservationist Dr. Samuel D. Gruber (Ruth's brother) (president of the International Survey of Jewish Monuments and writes the Jewish Art Monuments blog), wrote about the Piedmont synagogues. The essay was recently published in Ebrei Piemontese: The Jews of Piedmont with photos by Alberto Falco (New York: Yeshiva University Museum, 2008).

Vercelli began planning the synagogue as early as 1864 as the growing community then numbered about 600 (down to about 275 in 1931). The Vercelli ghetto had a prayer room from at least 1601. In 1630, a building belonging to the monks of Sant'Agata was made into a synagogue and, in 1830, it was located in a building of the friars of San Francesco.

The architect Marco Treves (1814-98) was invited to study the project. He was a prestigious architect, and a native of Vercelli, and had designed the classical style synagogue in Pisa (opened 1863). He was subsequently active in Florence, where he had participated in the construction of the great Tempio (1874-82) and he also served as superintendent of the Louvre in Paris. Treves's project was grandiose, but the Community decided to expend even more than he projected. Ten years later, in 1874, the community invited engineer Giuseppe Locarni to carry out an expanded project.

Construction began in 1874, and was completed four years later. To mark its completion, the Jewish community minted a bronze commemorative medal, following the tradition of Italy's Renaissance princes and popes.

Dr. Gruber's article is very detailed and discusses its tri-partite facade, with white-and-gray horizontal striping. Inside, there is a long central nave, with aisles separated by arcades on columns, and the aisles support vaulted galleries which support a dome. Walls feature tall top-rounded windows at the ends and large round windows in the central bay.

The raised ark and bimah (seen in the photo above) are reminiscent of Roman Catholic church altars, the decor is Classical and Moorish, with Hebrew inscriptions the length of the arcade.

According to Gruber:

As much as the Mole Antonelliana in Turin, the Vercelli synagogue speaks to the (perhaps overblown) aspirations of the emancipated Italian Jewish community. The fact that the synagogue stands silent today, in desperate need of repair, is moving testimony to just how misguided those aspirations were.

The Piedmontese Jewish communities had always been small, and with Emancipation came migration and assimilation, reducing them even more.

Even without the effect of the Holocaust, it is unlikely that a city like Vercelli (which had a Jewish population of only 275 in 1931) could have maintained a Jewish community large enough to need and strong enough to support a building this size.

Thank you to Samuel Gruber for providing this information. See Ruth's site for photographs.

The community website offers more articles (in Italian), and includes information on restoration projects in Bologna, Pisa and Biella.

Template glitch appears fixed!

That was quick!

Tracing the Tribe was trying all sorts of things and obviously one of them worked. It seems OK now!

Please let me know if you experience any other glitches or problems.

Template glitch - sidebar at bottom!

Tracing the Tribe is attempting to track down the cause of - and find a solution to - the current template problem.

Overnight, the sidebar on the right vanished, only to re-appear at the bottom of the template, under the postings. We have contacted the Blogger powers-that-be in an attempt to fix the problem. Please bear with us as we attempt fix the look.

The posts are there, the comments are there. Everything is there, except that the sidebar has decided to move.

As genealogists, we should be used to moving borders!

Art: Creating seder plates, through June 2

Only a few weeks to go to Passover, Pesach, Pessah, Pessaj.

No matter how you spell it, it is a time for the generations to come together to celebrate at special seder meals held on the first or the first two nights of the eight-day holiday, which marks the release of our ancestors from bondage in Egypt.

It is the perfect Jewish genealogy holiday, as many families use the multi-generational family seders as an excellent opportunity to retell and share the stories of their own immediate ancestors' migrations and immigrations.

This year, the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco invited 80 artists of different faiths and backgrounds to create their unique visions for Passover seder plates, which hold ritual foods symbolizing the holiday. The seder plate is an essential fixture at this home-and-family-based ceremony. To see photos of the plates and read more about the exhibit, click here.

The San Francisco-based Contemporary Jewish Museum Seder Plate Invitational is called "New Works/Old Story: 80 Artists at the Passover Table."

"It's so much fun to see what they come up with," said associate curator Dara Solomon of the ambitious, unusual show, which runs through June 2. "It's such a wide range of objects - some functional, some nonfunctional. It's a really fun exhibition."

For the past 25 years, the museum has invited diverse groups of artists to creatively explore and re-interpret a Judaic object, holiday or concept.

Here are the comments of three participating artists:

Contemporary ceramic artist Richard Shaw (Fairfax) is a respected and collected artist. His only connection with Passover was a seder he once attended with a high school friend, but he had been working on a series of pieces dealing with migration and cultures, so it fit right in with the exhibit.

His glazed porcelain blue-and-whiteware plate (see picture detail above left) features transfer decals, boats fashioned from torn pieces of paper and stamps of ships, heading in the same direction.

"This plate is about movement, travel and history - one culture traveling to another," he said. "It's about migration."

Grace Hawthorne (Mill Valley) worked with Phoebe Strebow (Oakland) to create a pop-art-style recreation of a seder meal, using a clipboard, pencils, Post-Its, binder clips, magic eraser and giant binder rings.

"I'm not Jewish and I was very unfamiliar with seder plates in the beginning," Hawthorne said. "But I'm Asian and the idea of food and family resonates with me.

"I thought using common every day objects would make this not so precious, but without taking away from the importance of the occasion," she explains. "It lends a familiarity. It makes art more accessible, more familiar, more comfortable. I literally raided my daughter's play food for this."

Sculptor Carl Dern (Fairfax) isn't Jewish and wasn't really familiar with the seder plate or Passover, but he's happy to have been asked to join in. One of the few metal artists in the show, he created a silverplated bronze piece with a hot wax finish.

A cantilevered steel base holds cup-shaped seder plates with the ceremonial items - lettuce, shank bone, charoset, bitter herb, parsley, egg - stamped on them. Overlooking the plates is the witness of the title, an empty, slightly imbalanced chair, one of Dern's signature images.

"New Works/Old Story: 80 Artists at the Passover Table" will continue through June 2, at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco.

China: Preserving Jewish history

Local Chinese experts called on Shanghai's government to prevent historic buildings in Hongkou District's Jewish conservation zone from being demolished. The old buildings were discovered during a roadworks project.

According to the Shanghai Daily, a German cafe sign was discovered on one building, and another German-style building was found to have been the White Horse Inn, run by a Jewish couple for five years from 1939 before becoming a Jewish medical clinic.

The significance of the new discoveries was revealed by a journalist who showed photographs to conservationist and professor Ruan Yisan. After interviews with Jews who grew up there and local area residents, the details were confirmed.

"These buildings have fallen into decay," said Zhang Yanhua, research director of Asian Pacific Regions World Heritage Training and Research Center under the United Nations. "But they are of high historical value and they should be properly restored and preserved."

Some 20,000 Jews flocked to Shanghai - considered a safe haven - in the 1930s. In 1943, they were restricted to a square-mile area in Hongkou which was called Little Vienna.

Government officials said they were trying to balance preservation and modernization. In 2005, 70 acres was declared a conservation zone. Although the recently discovered buildings are in that protected area, they are not designated historic buildings.

Officials said they will try to remove and save valuable items such as the signs. The city says demolitions are necessary to create more roads, while conservation experts say the road should narrower or that the buildings should be moved.

Los Angeles: Persian Shabbat at VBS, March 27-28

Back in 1989 or 1990, I organized a Persian Shabbat at our synagogue, Valley Beth Shalom, in Encino.

The sanctuary was filled to capacity on Friday night. The program, presented with the participation of Rabbi Harold Schulweis, included Persian poetry and Persian musicians (motrebi, who often sing at lifecycle events - a fixture of life in Iran and in Los Angeles). The guest cantor was our cousin, the late Aziz Dardashti, hazzan at one of the Persian synagogues in the Valley. The post-service Oneg Shabbat included Persian dancing.

I have just learned that March 27-28 is another Persian Shabbat, focusing on Esther's Children - a term for the Jews of Iran - with Scholars-in-Residence Dr. Homa Sarsahar, founder and director of the Center for Iranian Jewish Oral History (CIJOH), and Dr. Houman Sarshar, editor of the excellent book Esther's Children (farzandan-e-esther) and CIJOH director of publications.

The event includes an early Persian-Mizrahi Friday night shabbat service, followed by a Shabbat dinner ("A Night in Shushan," paid reservations required).

At 8pm, "The Heroes of Culture" takes place: How Iranian Jews saved Persian classical and popular music. An Oneg Shabbat with Persian music follows at 9pm.

On Saturday morning, a Persian-Mizrahi service begins at 8.45am, followed by a Shabbat Shiur (study session) focusing on "Esther’s Children: A Portrait of Iranian Jews from the Achaemenid (2500 BCE) to the Islamic Republic Period of Today."

I'm not sure if this has been done every year or not since that first event so long ago. It's just nice to know that 20 years later, there's another one scheduled!

If you are in the Los Angeles area, consider attending. There's more information on the VBS site.

Texas: 2nd Crypto-Jewish Conference, March 27

The second annual Crypto-Jewish Conference will take place Thursday and Friday March 26- 27 at the Texas A&M Hillel Foundation.

The conference, timed to coincide with the 400th anniversary of the publication of Cervantes’ epic work Don Quixote, will include scholar presentations. On Thursday, the event runs from noon-5.30pm; on Friday, from 9am-5.15pm. See the full agenda through the link 2009 Agenda at the website.

Click here for information on the speakers:

- Rafaela Acevedo-Field and Greg Cuéllar, “Crypto-Jewish Practice in 18th Century”
- Carlos Larralde, “A History of J.T. Canales”
- Stanley M. Hordes, "The Sephardic Legacy in New Mexico: A History of the Crypto-Jews”
- Consuelo Luz, “The Music of the Crypto-Jews”
- Bennett Greenspan, “DNA and Crypto Jews”
- Mike Pincus, “Using the Web as a Research Tool on Crypto-Judaism”
- David Gonzalez, “Alternatives for Integration into the Jewish Community.”

For more information, click here www.tamuhillel.org.

Latvia: Latvian Jewish Encyclopedia being prepared

Victoria Shaldova, executive director of Shamir, the Jewish community of Riga, Latvia, has written to Tracing the Tribe about a new community project.

My paternal grandfather was born in Riga, and we still have Talalay relatives living in Riga who moved there from Mogilev, Belarus following World War II. Unfortunately, however, I do not hold material to contribute. I'm hoping readers will be able to assist Shaldova.

Activity of "Shamir" is aimed to commemorating the memory of Latvian Jews.

The most significant project of us is Latvian Jewish Encyclopedia, which gathers information about all the Jews, connected to Latvia. It will be a memorial for the Latvian Jews, which do not exist now. We have gathered already more than 2 500 biographic and thematic entries and it is a half of the proposed amount. It covers the period of time from 1561 to 1991.

Now we are looking for Jews originally from Latvia, but living abroad. All the information about Latvian Jews (i.e. biographies, photos, family stories) is appreciated.

Looking forward to hearing from you soon,
thank you in advance,
Victoria Shaldova

Readers who would like to participate may email Shaldova. The website for the Riga Jewish community is Shamir.

UCLA: Western Jewish collection to go online in May

UCLA recently acquired a collection of Jewish history of the American West, compiled by the late Dr. Norton Stern and Rabbi William Kramer. David W. Epstein and Gladys Sturman catalogued, indexed and archived it.

Now digitized, it is expected to go online in May.

Kramer and Stern defined the American West as all the land west of the Mississippi River, Hawaii and parts of Mexico. Jews played a large role in the West's development because they were literate, knew about business and were trusted by gold prospectors and native Americans.

The collection was in some 400 boxes of photos, documents, scrapbooks, clippings, memoirs and other memorabilia. Stern, an optomotrist, searched small Western towns looking for relevant items, and amassed most of the collection.

Assisting the project were members of Congregation Shir Ami (Woodland Hills) with funding from the Jewish Community Foundation ($18,000 grant) and from Sturman herself ($10,000).

The collection has been digitized by history doctoral candidate Caroline Luce.

Also benefiting from Stern and Kramer's work are the American Jewish University (1,000 books), Autry National Center (2,000 photos) with ephemera to the Huntington Research Library - partnering with USC.

This new online resource should be valuable for those searching Western Jewish history.

Food: Sweet and Sour

Food and Jews go together, and this summer's 29th International Jewish Genealogical Conference will feature several programs on this topic. Philadelphia chef and author of 10 cookbooks Aliza Green will present "Sweet and Sour" at the conference, which will be held August 2-7, in Philadelphia.

Green will also appear at 8pm, Saturday, March 28 for a talk, tasting and book signing at her own synagogue, Or Hadash Reconstructionist Congregation, in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, where she will talk about her next book which she's now researching, Sweet and Sour: How Jewish Traders Changed the Way the World Eats

Here's an interview - "Jews Change the Way the World Eats" - with Green that appeared just before Purim. See her yummy recipes and save them for next year's celebration.

The first chocolate, vanilla, and citrus fruit plantations in the New World were started by Jews? The smoked, pickled, and salted fish business, too, was started by Jews. Jews from the Canary Islands owned the earliest sugar plantations in Brazil. The dried fruit and nut business? Also Jewish.

All of this information, and more, rolls off the tongue of experienced chef and cookbook author Aliza Green like sweet butter off a hot brioche, as you can’t help but catch her infectious excitement about the history of Jewish food.

Green will bring that history alive with a talk and tasting Saturday evening, March 28 at Or Hadash Reconstructionist Congregation, Fort Washington, PA. Because the program will be held immediately following the Havdalah ceremony that marks the close of the Sabbath, with its requisite spices, she’ll begin the program with spices, a Jewish business in India close to 2,000 years ago, and spicy recipes.

Jewish traders, most of them Sephardic, changed the way we eat. Their farflung connections, frequently with distant family branches, enabled this influence and expansion of available ingredients.

In some countries, certain occupations were considered Jewish. Green mentions frigatore, a fried food maker at street stands, during Roman times, and makes connections between the symbolism of certain foods at certain Jewish holidays.

Green’s love of food, especially Jewish food, and the unique history surrounding it, began in childhood, when her father’s work as a theoretical physicist allowed the family to travel and live throughout the world. By age 10, she was cooking for her family and, as an adult, her love of languages, history, literature, and cultural studies, as well as food, led her to make the connections that now fuel her passion.

Green has consulted with restaurants on their menus and developed recipes, wrote food columns for the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News, co-authored a cookbook with Georges Perrier, and went on to author or co-author 10 more cookbooks.

Her new cookbook is based on a very Jewish method of cooking, combining sweet and sour flavors.

“Eating sweet and sour together is a very Jewish way to cook, and it’s also a recognition of a very Jewish outlook on life,” she says. “Think about breaking the glass at a wedding, or combining sweet charoset and bitter horseradish at Passover, for example.”

She will provide an overview of the history, as well as a taste of the specially prepared foods. The menu will include onion and poppyseed kichel with sour cream and herring; pan levi or biscuits made with mace, a traditional recipe from Curacao, that will be dipped in spiced hot chocolate; and “stuffed monkey,” a Sephardic recipe for pastries made with a filling of dried fruits and cashews, that comes from a Jewish bakery in East London.

The interview included Purim recipes and history of hamantaschen, the traditional Ashkenazi triangle-shaped filled pastries.

These triangular poppy seed–filled cookies hail from the Ashkenazi Jewish tradition and commemorate the Jewish holiday of Purim. In the fifth century BCE, in the reign of King Achashverosh of Persia, Mordechai, a Jew, refused to prostrate himself before Haman, the King’s vizier. Offended, Haman set out “to destroy all the Jews that were throughout the whole kingdom of Achashverosh” (from the Book of Esther). The Jews were saved from Haman's deadly plan by the intervention of Mordecai’s beautiful cousin, Esther, who had been chosen as queen a few years earlier. The pastries are made in the shape of Haman's tricorn hat. Symbolically, this long-ago enemy of the Jewish people is destroyed by gobbling up the cookies. In Italy, another version of the pastries are called orecchie di Aman (Haman’s ears), and are consumed just as quickly.

The recipes (click here) are for Honey-Poppy Seed Hamantaschen; a Roman Jewish specialty of olive oil-fried and marinated zucchini (Roman Conchia di Zucchine); and a Sephardic (Portugal via the Netherlands) double-layered pastry filled with raisins, candied citrus rind (Stuffed Monkey).

Blast from the past: Maxwell House Haggadah

How many of you grew up with the Maxwell House Haggadah for Passover? I know I did.

My almost-antique copies - some inherited from my grandmother - have lived in New York, Florida, California, Nevada and even in Teheran, Iran.

My copies rank right up there with our lifecycle kipah collection, which can be pulled out to use for your own seders.

On the pages of my copies I can see my family history. Each stain of wine, charoset, drops of salt water or vinegar, marks a gathering of Jews retelling the ancient story.

This month's Moment Magazine has a story on this good-to-the-last-drop publication.

In 1923, when Maxwell House Coffee signed on with the Joseph Jacobs Advertising agency in New York, it was already a legend. Theodore Roosevelt supposedly drank a cup in 1907 at the Nashville hotel for which it was named, proclaiming it “good to the last drop.”

Fortune smiled even more on the brand when Jacobs conceived a plan to entice American Jews to serve the coffee at their Seders. First, he lined up a prominent rabbi to assure Jews that coffee beans were not forbidden legumes but fruit. Then he convinced his client to underwrite America’s first mass-marketed Haggadah.

When it appeared in 1934, free with the purchase of a can of coffee, the Maxwell House Haggadah swiftly revolutionized how American Jews celebrated Passover.

Although we had other haggadot in my parents' and grandparents' home, they were single copies and not useful for reading around the table as each was different. The little booklets were made for large groups - everyone had a copy of the same one and would be on the same page at the same time.

In the story, Jewish Theological Seminary professor Rabbi Burton L. Visotsky says the coffee company "did more to codify Jewish liturgy than any force in history.”

My own copies are from different years. The older ones seem to have more Hebrew, the newer ones have more transliteration, added in the 1960s. But experts quoted in the story say the new seder guide was accepted because of the quality of its Hebrew, which was based on the work of Wolf Heidenheim, a famous Hebrew liturgical scholar and author of an acclaimed 1800 Hebrew-German prayerbook.

The English translation was necessary and welcomed because the children and grandchildren of the immigrant generation were losing their Hebrew. In my maternal grandparents' home, we used more English and my grandfather preferred short and fast seders. It was very different in my paternal grandparents' home, where my Riga-born grandfather conducted extremely long seders read very slowly and completely only in Hebrew. We were always asleep before dinner was served.

American consumers also liked the Maxwell House Haggadah because it was readily available at groceries, lightweight and small enough for a child to hold and simple to store. But its popularity was not exclusive to the American market: Copies made their way to secular Israeli kibbutzim and far-flung military bases and were smuggled during the 1970s to Soviet refuseniks, who cherished them, sometimes as their only Jewish possession.

Maxwell House, now owned by Kraft, still publishes the guide with only some updating of graphics. In the 1990s, the words “Next Year in Jerusalem” were moved from before the fourth cup of wine to the end of the Haggadah.

Over 75 years, some 50 million copies have been printed. In 2009, 1 million copies were distributed to supermarket chains, such as Shop Rite, Albertsons and Publix. I seem to remember a similar distribution in Los Angeles one year It was mentioned in an ad and, by the time we got there, every copy was gone!

Although there are thousands of various Haggadadot in print - and many families also make their own, as do various synagogues and other Jewish institutions - this modest little booklet holds its own among the blue-velvet-covered boxed works of art, which we also own.

Approximately 50 million copies have been printed over the past 75 years. The advertising agency that started it all doesn't even have an archive - they buy old ones on eBay!

Now, who remembers the really excellent little Passover cookbook (more like a booklet), on brownish-orange paper (I guess it was considered "peanut color") that Planter's Peanut Oil used to publish? I had a copy of its simple yet delicious recipes, and it too lived with us in all of our various locations.

Argentina: Tracing Jewish gauchos, podcast

"Shalom Argentina" traces the Jewish gauchos and agricultores incorporated mate (a South American drink) without leaving aside their own traditions.

This podcast, by Rita Saccal, focuses on life in the JCA Colonies in Argentina.

The 25-minute presentation includes a brief history of the Jewish people after leaving Czarist Russia and arriving in a free Argentina, a place that would be their homeland. Their life in the colonies, aspects of Jewish publishing in those settlements, the migration of future generations to Buenos Aires, and the “revival” of the colonies through tourist trips are all covered.

Saccal has worked at the Seminario Rabinico Latinoamericano “Marshall T. Meyer” in Buenos Aires since 1989 and has served as its head librarian since 1997.

The Association of Jewish Libraries (AJL) offers audio lectures, panel discussions, author talks and more.

AJL promotes Jewish literacy through enhancement of libraries and library resources and through leadership for the profession and practitioners of Judaica librarianship.

It fosters access to information, learning, teaching and research relating to Jews, Judaism, the Jewish experience and Israel. There is also an AJL blog, People of the Books. There is a list of Internet resources here, although no Jewish genealogy sources are listed.

See the complete podcast list here.

Oregon: Choosing genealogy software, March 17

At the next meeting of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Oregon, Marty Krauter will offer guidelines to help researchers decide which genealogy software program to select, as well as how to maintain and present genealogical research on a computer.

He'll include research goals, recording, source documentation, information output and a suggested program list.

The Portland program begins at 7pm, Tuesday, March 17, at Ahavath Achim Synagogue.

For 12 years, Krauter has been chair of the Genealogical Forum of Oregon’s Computer Interest Group. He has been actively doing genealogy for 14 years. He has a strong interest in Irish Genealogy where he has traced two of his wife’s family lines to their ancestral village. Marty is an accountant who loves the analytical nature of genealogy.

Admission: JGSO members, free; others, $5. For more details, click here.

Rhode Island: Touro synagogue's money problems

The JTA reported that the oldest Jewish synagogue in the US - Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island - has canceled public tours and fired the last two paid staff members.

There are plans to open a museum of American Jewish history.

Summer 2009 already reserved group tours will be offered, but no new ones will be booked.

A National Historic Site, the popular Jewish tourist destination was built in 1763. The National Trust for Historic Preservation named it the country's first religious historic site in 2001.

Tracing the Tribe has previously posted about Touro Synagogue. Search for "rhode island" and previous postings will pop up.

Ancestry Magazine: Preview edition online

Ancestry.com has provided an online 37-page preview edition of the March/April 2009 issue here.

Diverse articles touch on facial recognition and Jesse James, handwriting analysis of ancestral signatures and making a custom family history timeline.

Check out more of the complete issues' articles (and past issue archives) here and past issue archives for articles on many more family history topics.

Other articles in this issue include a wild science timeline, yearbook clues, German geographic initials, along with the latest technology, tools and trends (photo dating, facial recognition technology, name recognition software, online translation tools, handwriting analysis, and geotagging.

It was nice to see MyHeritage.com mentioned in the facial recognition and name recognition software sections.

Do check the archives for articles of relevance to your searches.

By searching for "jewish," I found several articles: Scourges of the 19th Century (epidemics), Jewish Childhood Records (circumcision records, etc.), Roots Recovered (Jewish ancestry and Ancestry's Jewish Family History Collection), Meeting My New Family (DNA testing and genetic cousins), Silence (Holocaust and reconnecting), Visiting History on the Lower East Side (immigration), Is DNA Abolishing Differences or Embracing Them? (by Abraham's Children author Jon Entine, inherited Jewish conditions and more).

In Foreign Languages for Family Historians, Jewish genealogist Rafael Guber is quoted and advises Jewish researchers to learn the vocabulary for vital records in numerous records, and also talks about the value of volumes of rabbinical responsa in tracing family.

In only one (Jon Entine's DNA article) was Sephardic heritage mentioned; he also mentioned Mizrahi origins. Way to go, Jon!

New York: A Spanish Torah discovered

The things you may find on Staten Island now include a Spanish Torah created between 1272 and 1302, and attributed to the famous Spanish sofer (scribe, Hebrew) Shem-Tob ben Abraham ibn Gaon.

The New York Times story here posits who should get the Torah and I've included my own suggestions at the bottom of this posting.

THE weathered brown parchment with its frayed edges and inked Hebrew letters seemed beautiful but unremarkable.

Itzhak Winer, a 34-year-old Torah scribe turned Judaica seller, considered the item a nice find, but just one of the 30 or more Torahs he buys and sells in a year. From his Jerusalem dealer, he learned that the Torah had been owned by a family in Morocco and was in excellent condition.

“He knew that it’s old, but he didn’t really know — and neither did I — how special it was,” said Mr. Winer, who works out of his home in Willowbrook, Staten Island.

Winer was curious about its origins and took it to Rabbi Yitzchok Reisman on New York's Lower East Side. He's an expert in identifying antique Torahs, the scrolls containing the first five books of Moses.

Reisman has been interested in the field since he was a Brooklyn teen. The Lower East Scribes scribes shared their knowledge and he learned the stories of the ancient scrolls. He went on to the purchase and sale of Torah scrolls. He also restores them using handmade ink and carved turkey feathers at his Grand Street workshop.

“There were 400 congregations that were declining, closing up and selling off the Torahs and the assets,” he said. As Torahs from the Lower East Side migrated to the suburbs and across the continent, the sellers, he saw, “helped transfer the Torah scrolls on to the rest of America.”

Reisman realized that this particular scroll was unique.

The materials and calligraphic style identified it as Spanish, which meant that it was written before 1492, when the Jews were expelled from Spain. In addition, the strong swirls on the top of certain letters matched the style favored in kabbalah, the Jewish mystical movement.

“There are very, very few manuscripts and pieces of manuscripts that are older than the 1400s,” Rabbi Reisman said on a recent day in his ramshackle office as Mr. Winer looked on. And the kabbalistic flourishes, the rabbi added, make it “the only Spanish Torah known done in that way.”

These special markings are “like thorns that appear in certain letters that only show up in a small window of time,” Rabbi Reisman said.

Where should this Torah find a home? The men said that they hope to find a person, a community or an organization that wants to preserve the Spanish kabbalistic tradition, and it's important to give the scroll the respect it deserves.

Personally, I hope that this very special Torah will find a loving home at a true Sephardic congregation where it belongs as a tangible symbol of its membership's ancient roots.

I would further suggest that Reisman and Winer carefully vet congregations interested in obtaining this important scroll, and help it find a loving home in an authentic recognized Jewish congregation, and not a so-called Messianic congregation which is a church and not an authentic synagogue.

Further, I believe it should be a Jewish congregation which includes Converso Hispanics who have returned to Judaism centuries after having their faith stolen from them by the Inquisition, which forced their conversion to Catholicism. This Torah scroll is a direct link to their ancestors, and will provide a continuous emotional, spiritual and tangible connection to their history and faith.

Museum of Family History: New this month

There's always something new at Steve Lasky's virtual Museum of Family History. Here's the March update:

- “Churbn Lettland: The Destruction of the Jews of Latvia” – Very important telling of events, written in 1947 by a survivor. More material from the English translation has been added, mainly about the Small Riga Ghetto. Also included, an index of all surnames in the book. Visit the “Wall of Remembrance,” with photos of some who died or were killed in Latvia during WWII. Add your own photos and biographies;

- The the film preview for "Horodok: A Shtetl's Story 1920-1945" is now online. Just scroll down to no. 19 and click. Make sure your speakers are on before you do, as the film clip begins once the page opens. The film is in Hebrew with English subtitles. There are several places named Horodok/Gorodok. This one is north of Minsk in the area between Rakov, Radishkovitz and Moladechna.

-Yiddish Theatre: Morris Axelrad, Yiddish actor; Placards of the Yiddish Theatre.

- Postcards from Home: Budapest, Hungary; Ilza, Poland; Czernowitz, Ukraine.

- World Holocaust Memorials: Lithuania – Kupiskis, Rokiskis.

- Living in America: The Jewish Experience – Thomas Jefferson High School, Brooklyn, New York. Currently, 32 yearbooks (1927-1949) are now online, browsable page-to-page or searchable using the Steve Morse one-step database.

Steve writes that he now has 20 additional books (from 1950) but needs volunteers for simple data entry. Watch for updates on the genealogical importance of yearbooks.

- Steve adds that he's working on a site redesign and would like some opinions. If you'd like to evaluate it, contact him.

He'll also be producing a free periodic Museum e-newsletter (not a blog) for those who have supported his work through contributions of material (photos, text, etc.) - see the “Credits and Acknowledgments” page. Supporters will be the first to receive news of future exhibits, links to previews, hear other ideas, read relevant words of inspiration, and more.

Those who would like to receive it by email, should write to Steve here, including your first and last name, email address and, for statistical purposes only, your country, state and town.

For other questions or information, write to Steve.

True Confessions of a Jewish Genealogist

Randy Seaver at Geneamusings often challenges us with interesting topics on his Saturday Night challenge. The assignment is to answer these questions about our genealogy life:

1. When did you start genealogy research? 1989.

2. Why did you start doing research? As most readers know by now, my daughter brought home a one-page Hebrew School assignment asking her to write the names of several generations of family: "Even your great-grandparents." That weekend, we attended a lifecycle celebration in my husband's huge Persian family in Los Angeles. We began asking questions and before we knew it, we came home with several hundred cocktail napkins covered with family information back to the 1800s, supplied by some of the family's "walking encyclopedias." Our daughter turned to me and said that now we had to do my side of the family.

3. What was your first big success in research? With my daughter, I visited the Santa Monica (California) Family History Center and went through reels of microfilm. We found the first written evidence of our Talalay family in the New York arrival record of my great-grandmother. That made the quest very real for me, and also very important, because there were few people to ask.

4. What is your biggest genealogy regret? A small one: While doing research for a high school history project at the New York Public Library, I found a postcard stuck in a book (name forgotten) written by my grandfather to his sister. Instead of taking the postcard, which was not library property, I replaced it, and merely told my family about it when I came home. Everyone said I should have brought it home.

The regret category winner is this one: A long, long time ago (way before the Internet, before email, before cellphones), when we were living in Teheran and I had never heard of genealogy, I visited Israel, as we frequently did in those days.

On a whim, I checked the English language phone book for what I had always heard was our original name, Talalay. Shockingly, there was a listing for Avram Talalay, a carpenter/furniture maker - the same profession that ran in our family. I took down all the details and the phone number but never called.

For some reason, I thought he would only speak Hebrew or Yiddish, neither of which I knew. The idea of asking the hotel's front desk to run interference simply never occured to me. Yes, yes, I know - you're shaking your heads, muttering that youth is wasted on the young. I agree.

The scrap of paper was put away, only to be discovered decades later while we were moving from Los Angeles to Nevada (after I had recently discovered genealogy).

Fast forward another huge chunk of time, when I was working with a new-found cousin in Toronto, the late Victor Talalay, on putting together the pieces of our family. I mentioned my scrap of paper, Victor said "hold on." I heard rustling of papers, drawers opening and closing. "Is this the information you found?" he asked, reading me the same exact information. Victor had been in Israel around the same time and found the same information. He hadn't called either.

As soon as I got off the phone with Victor, I wrote to the address in Israel. Very soon I received a letter from the granddaughter saying that her grandfather had died very recently, but that other relatives were there.

I sat on an important family connection for decades, as had Victor. It never occurred to us that it was strange that in a Hebrew-speaking country, our relative had chosen the option to place his name and details in the English directory. The granddaughter told me that her grandfather had always hoped relatives would come looking for him so that's why he made sure to list the information. Two of us were there and found the listing, neither of us called. Her grandfather died without hearing from anyone. I cried for weeks.

The moral of this sad tale: Never procrastinate, never wait. Always follow up on the smallest details as soon as is humanly possible. What this story proved: Our family, despite being separated by time and geography, share the procrastination and packrat genes.

5. What are you best known for in the genealogy world? Blogging Jewish genealogy, beginning a discussion about the Sephardic origins of an increasing number of Ashkenazi families, writing about Jewish genealogy in general audience newspapers and magazines.

6. What is your professional status in genealogy? Not certified, but thinking about it - if there is ever enough time. I don't take clients, but refer people to friends working in those particular fields.

7. What is your biggest genealogy achievement? Two major achievements: 1. Genealogy columnist at the Jerusalem Post (1999-2005, "It's All Relative") which garnered an international readership for the twice-monthly column in print and online, bringing genealogy to a wide general readership, most of whom had never heard the term. 2. Being asked by JTA (thank you, Andy Neusner!) to start blogging with Tracing the Tribe, which has racked up (since August 2006) 1,822 published posts (average about two per day, but actually sometimes as many as five or six!), with many more in draft.

8. What is the most FUN you've had doing genealogy? Meeting geneablogger colleagues at the Southern California Genealogical Society 2008 Jamboree. Genealogically speaking, two events qualify. 1. Discovering the "lost" Bombay branch of the Dardashti family here in Israel, and 2. Finding a 1353 document (thank you, Maria Jose!) in a Spanish archive for our Sephardic-rooted Talalay family.

9. What is your favorite genealogy how-to book? All books hinging on either Ashkenazi or Sephardi genealogy, ancestry and how-to, such as Dr. Jeffrey S. Malka's "Sephardic Genealogy."

10. What notable genealogist would you like to meet someday? I would have liked to meet Rabbi Malcolm Stern, who is called the father of modern Jewish genealogy and whose research on early American Jewish families is essential material.

Thanks, Randy, for this suggestion!

Sacramento: Ukraine scrapbook, March 15

Allan Dolgow will describe his recent roots trip to Ukraine at the next meeting of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Sacramento (California).

The program - "Ukraine Scrapbook -- A Journey That Took 105 Years to Plan and Finally Take" - begins at 10am, Sunday, March 15, at the Albert Einstein Residence Center, 1935 Wright St. Sacramento.

In August 2008, Dolgow visited Kiev, Novograd Volinsky, Kamenny Brod and Polonne.

Using data bases, networking and applying a different approach, he located an 87-year-old second cousin - her grandfather and his were brothers - living in Polonne; she was a Russian Army field hospital surgeon during WW II.

The meeting with the cousin and other family members added branches to Dolgow's family tree, and he discovered relatives in Israel, France, Russia, India, and the United States.

Everyone is welcome to attend and to utilize the group's library collection. For more details, see the JGSS link above.

Family Tree Magazine: Free ebook offer

What's better than getting one thing for free? How about two things for free?

Family Tree Magazine is giving away a free ebook to readers who sign up for the publication's free weekly email Update newsletter.

The book is the 42-page "Best of the Photo Detective." It's a step-by-step guide to help you examine old family photos for hidden clues as to when they were taken and who’s in them. It includes an exclusive excerpt from "Uncovering Your Ancestry Through Family Photographs" by the magazine's Photo Detective, Maureen A. Taylor.

The Update newsletter delivers the latest news, tips and resources for doing family history research.

Sign up here, and you will receive a link to download the book as a PDF file.

San Francisco: Photo Restoration, March 15

Photographer and photo restoration expert Jason Rose will demonstrate using photographs to trace your roots, at the next San Francisco meeting of the multi-branched San Francisco Bay Area Jewish Genealogical Society.

Rose will speak on the importance of personal photographs in tracing ancestral roots and present a before-and-after slide show of restored photos, along with hints and tips for beginners.

The owner and principal artist at Rose Restorations Photo Restoration Studio in San Francisco, Rose specializes in digital photo restoration. Along with more than 14 years of working with Adobe PhotoShop, he also has a background in oil painting.

His mission is to preserve and restore the integrity of ancestral photographs while enhancing the original spirit of the images. View his online portfolio here.

Doors open at 12.30pm (program starts at 1pm), Sunday, March 15, at the Jewish Community High School, 1835 Ellis Street, San Francisco.

There is free parking (enter from Pierce Street); admission is free and guests are always welcome.

For more details, view the society website here

Journal: Contents of GenAmi 47

Micheline Gutmann of GenAmi (Paris, France) announced the articles in the newest issue (no. 47) of the GenAmi journal.

Articles include:

- The family of Leefmann CALMER, glory and oblivion.

Born in Friesland (1713), married in Den Haag, he arrived in France where King Louis the 14th gave him important territory near Amiens. He was ruined by trials conducted by the Catholic Church. Of his seven children, two sons were executed during the Revolution, and several marriages were made with French noble families ...

- A very modest Jewish family from Alsace.
Jules ADLER was a painter born in Franche-Comte, a marvellous painter of poor people.

- Pont-Audemer in Normandy, a Jewish community in the Middle Ages.

- The Jews of Valreas (north of Avignon) in the 16th century.

- Livornese and Tunisian - History of the Jews of Tunisia and their names, by specialist Prof. Boccara.

- The Jewish cemetery of Tunis, the Borgel, the AICJT and the GenAmi project.

- New content at the GenAmi website.

- Djerba: The El Ghriba Synagogue.

For information on how to obtain the journal, click here (French) or here (English).

If your research focuses on France, consider becoming a GenAmi member as benefits include teh journal and an extensive member's only section with various databases.

New York City: Major book sale, March 8, 11, 12

Are you a devout bibliophile always looking for book sales?

Dan Wyman Books is moving from the city to Brooklyn, and is reducing the inventory that has to be physically moved.

They're offering a 40% Off Moving Sale at the Manhattan location, 12 W. 27th Street, 13th floor, between Broadway and Sixth Avenue.

Days and hours:

Sunday, March 8, 10am-3pm
Wednesday, March 11, 11am-7pm
Thursday, March 12, 11am-7pm
Closed for Purim: Monday and Tuesday, March 9-10

After the move, the company invites visitors to browse the extensive Judaica and Hebraica collection by appointment at the Williamsburg, Brooklyn location. It will also continue to publish quality catalogs of important, interesting, and unusual titles in all fields of Jewish studies.

For more details, check out the link above.

Online: Jewish Women encyclopedia

The Jewish Women's Archive has announced the launch of the online version of "Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia", the first comprehensive source on Jewish women.

It is now accessible for free here. Previously it was only available on CD-Rom.

Originally published by Alice and Moshe Shalvi (Shalvi Publishing Ltd.), it was edited by Professors Paula Hyman (Yale University) and Dalia Ofer (Hebrew University of Jerusalem).

According to the press release:

It features over 1,700 biographies, 300 thematic essays, and 1,400 photographs and illustrations on a wide range of Jewish women through the centuries - from Gertrude Berg to Gertrude Stein; Hannah Greenbaum Solomon to Hannah Arendt; the Biblical Ruth to Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Never before has so much well-researched and well-written material about Jewish women been available in one place online. Accessible and free to Internet users all over the world, the Encyclopedia appeals to a wide range of readers, including
educators, activists, high school students, researchers, scholars, and the merely curious. Its thematic and visual links make it possible to draw connections across time and space in ways that are impossible in a printed book.

Please help us spread the word by forwarding this e-mail to your colleagues, family, and friends! Let us know how you are using the Encyclopedia.

Send feedback to Jordan Namerow, Online Communications Specialist, Jewish Women's Archive.

The Jewish Women's Archive is located at 138 Harvard Street, Brookline, MA 02446.

Spain: Girona times, places symposium, March 23-25

Girona is a fascinating city - I've been there several times and never fail to visit the wonderful bookshop at the Bonastruc Center. Later this month, an international conference will take place at the city's Institut d'Estudis Nahmanides.

"Times and Places of Jewish Girona" is set for March 23-25, at the Institute. For more information, see online or email here.

The municipality of Girona published, in 1998, two volumes edited by Dr. David Romano, on the history of Jewish Girona. Titled "Per a una història de la Girona jueva” they include a compilation of the main texts written on topic. I purchased the volumes on my first trip to the city.

Dr. Romano's bibliographic collection of Judaica has been donated to the Patronat Call de Girona and a special presentation will take place on the final day of the conference.

Research has been conducted on this community by national and international scholars over the past two decades. The conference, open to all, aims to make this research accessible, spotlight recent discoveries and historical advances. The cost is 60 Euros and simultaneous translation is available in Catalan, Spanish and English. Register through March 15 online.

I was pleased to read the list of advisory committee members and have met several of them, including Dr. Jordi Casanovas PhD (Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya), Dr. Joan Ferrer PhD (U. Girona) and Ds. Danièle Iancu PhD (Gallia Judaica, CNRS Montpéllier). Others are Dr. Asunción Blasco PhD (U. Zaragoza), Dr. Dolors Bramon PhD (U. Barcelona), Dr. Javier Castaño PhD (Dep. Estudios Hebraicos y Sefardíes del CSIC), Dr. Eduard Feliu Phd (Societat Catalana d’Estudis Hebraics) and Dr. Josep M. Nolla PhD (U. Girona).

Presenters represent universities in the US, Israel, France, Italy and Spain.

The conference opening is by Jaume Riera of Barcelona's Archives of the Crown of Aragon, on the organization of Girona's Jewish community.

Other topics include:

Studies and archeological elements in connection with the Girona Call, material objects in a Jewish residence, a look at illustrated Sephardic Haggadot, documents and Hebrew fragments in the Catalan archives, the place of Jewish Catalan in the Judeo-Hispanic world, directions in medieval Judeo-Catalan culture, Girona's Jews in the 14th century, The Girona Cathedral and the Jews in the 15th century, Catalan and Girona Jews in medieval Italy, aspects of the social history of Castello d'Empuries Jewish community in the 14th century, links between the Jews of medieval Perpignan and Girona (marriage, family and business), Girona's community in 13th-14th century documents in Vic, Catalan translation of the ketubbah of Asturga and Mair Vidal (Besalu, 14th century), Jacob ben Sheshet and his critique of science and others.

If you will be in the "neighborhood," consider attending this conference. I wish I could be there.

Los Angeles: Steve Morse-a-thon, March 15

A Steve Morse marathon will be hosted by the Jewish Genealogical Society of Los Angeles, at Valley Beth Shalom in Encino.

I'm delighted that my former congregation is hosting this special event with one of my favorite people.

Steve will present three talks beginning at 1pm, Sunday, March 15, at VBS, 15739 Ventura Blvd.

On the agenda is "From DNA to Genetic Genealogy: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know But Were Afraid to Ask!" I first heard Steve present this talk at the Southern California Genealogical Society's Jamboree. Offered with his special humor, this sometimes hard-to-understand topic is made very simple. You'll certainly understand genes, chromosomes, DNA and much more.

"One-Step Webpages: A Hodgepodge of Lesser-Known Gems" provides information on unusual techniques for solving problems involving genealogical searches, identity theft and DNA analysis.

"The Jewish Calendar Demystified" will explain the 19-year calendar cycle, the origin of time (yes, really!), errors in the Jewish and secular calendars, and the use of Hebrew letters to represent dates on tombstones.

The indefatigable Stephen P. Morse is an amateur genealogist whose name is a household word. The recipient of the 2003 IAJGS Outstanding Contribution Award continues to work tirelessly on behalf of all genealogical researchers.

Admission: JGSLA members, no charge; others, $5.

For more information, click here.

DNA: Jaffe family study seeks participants

If you are a Jaffe (or variation), there's a FamilyTreeDNA.com project with your name on it.

Searching for Jaffe descendants of various origins is Bill Yoffee, administrator of the Jaffe DNA project, who's encouraging many more Jaffe families to be Y-DNA tested to learn more.

"I am trying to assist members of the project, after they have exhausted the use of available documentary records, to surmount their dead-end genealogical research efforts by means of DNA genealogy testing and to establish some families' connections with notable ancestors," says Bill.

One famous Jaffe is Rabbi Mordechai Jaffe, known as ba'alei haLibushim, codifier of rabbinical law, author of the book Libushim. Born in Prague around 1530, he died in Posen in 1612.

The genealogy of a rabbinical and scholarly family named Jaffe/Joffe is documented as far back as 15th-century Bologna, Italy (online Jewish Encyclopedia 1901-1906). References are also found in 13th, 14th and 15th-century Spanish records.

In Pere Bonnin's book, "Sangre Judia," the following variations appear (with date of document and city where the document was found):

JAFA - 1212, Lleida city
JAFE - 1365, Estella Navarra
JAFFA - 1400, Santa Columa de Queralt Tarragona region
JAFFE - 1311, Girona
JOFA - 1237, Valencia
JOFE - 1404, Estella Navarra
JAFFIA - 1352, Falset Tarragona
JAFIA - 1175, Barcelona

There are other variations that begin with E, I, J, Y and Z. All derive from the Hebrew root word yafeh (yud, peh, heh), meaning pretty. The Israeli port city of Jaffa has a history going back thousands of years, and is mentioned in the Torah.

In Yemen, there is both a Yafa city and province; some Arab families claim the surname is derived from those geographic localities. Families named IOFE (transliterated from Cyrillic) were common in the Russian Empire in various geographic areas, such as Lithuania and Belarus - my own Jaffe connection was centered in Mogilev.

The name is found in Turkey, Island of Rhodes, Egypt and Mesopotamia, and both YAFFE and JAFFE families are today in Israel.

The JAFFE-JOFFE spelling, according to Bill, originated in Central Europe's German-speaking lands where the character J is voiced as Y.

The DNA project has 13 members, not large enough to draw firm conclusions about the families' origins. However, the results include the following:

- Seven members carry the name or a variation, and are determined or predicted to be Haplogroup E1b1b1, common among both Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews.

- Two members are determined or predicted to be Haplogroup R (R1a1 and R2). According to Bill, these have Central Asian origins, but R2 appears in a cluster of Ashkenazi Jews and is suspected to have a connection with the Khazars. The R2 member is a third-generation descendant of a famous 19th-century rabbi.

- One member is Haplogroup G, which appears to have Anatolian origins, but does appear among a significant number of Ashkenazi Jews.

- Two members are Haplogroup J1e, with origins in the Southern Levant (the Arabian Peninsula, the Sinai and the Negev) and is frequent among Arabs (Bedouins, Yemeni, Palestinians) and Jews (particularly Cohanim). One does not carry the surname. One member who does not carry the surname but is a descendant of a family that does, is Haplogroup I2b1, closely related to Haplogroup J.

A conclusion from this small sample is that not all Jaffe or variations are directly descended from a common Jewish male ancestor. Some ancestors might have adopted it, perhaps in the early 19th century, are products of those who converted to Judaism, or acquired the name through a matrilineal connection or marriage.

"Some of the mysteries may never be solved," he says. "However, the larger the sample the better are the chances of accumulating useful evidence and drawing reasonable conclusions."

Bill urges any male who has inherited the JAFFE-JOFFE surname or variation to join the Y-DNA project and provide as much family history as possible. Data is confidential and not useful for any other purpose. Project membership carries a substantial discount on the price of testing.

For more information, write to Bill Yoffee.

New York: Eastern Europe Jewish Heritage seminar, June 22-25

The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research wll sponsor the third EPYC Educators Seminar on East European Jewish Heritage, June 22-25, at the Center for Jewish History in New York City.

Eligible to attend are teachers in Jewish high schools, colleges, public and private schools, museums and afternoon religious schools, and graduate students in education and Jewish studies. Participants will receive free tuition, course materials, books, DVDs, daily breakfast and lunch and a modest transportation stipend.

The program includes lectures by prominent scholars, musicians and performers as well as how to use available materials in classrooms. Conference attendees will have access to the YIVO Library and Archives and other resources of the Center for Jewish History.

The event chair is Dr. Robert Moses Shapiro, Associate Professor of Judaic Studies, Brooklyn College, and the co-chair is Dr. Paul Glasser, Associate Dean of the Max Weinreich Center, YIVO Institute.

Speakers will include professors Robert Seltzer (Hunter College), Samuel D. Kassow (Trinity College), Miriam Hoffman (Columbia University), Nancy Sinkoff (Rutgers University), Chava Lapin (Queens College, YIVO), film director Joshua Waletzky, Folksbiene artistic director Zalmen Mlotek, and others.

The last day is a guided walking tour of Brooklyn's Borough Park Jewish community, home to tens of thousands of Yiddish-speaking Hasidim and other Jews.

To apply, applications must be submitted electronically and include a description of educational and professional background, along with a letter of recommendation. Event sponsors are the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, Inc.; The Rabbi Israel Miller Fund for Shoah Research,Education and Documentation; and the Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture.

For more information, contact Dr. Paul Glasser or Prof. Robert M. Shapiro. The application deadline is May 4. Click here for more.

Scheduled lectures include (for details, click here):

Monday
800 Years of East European Jewry
East European Jewry between the World Wars
Overview of Yiddish and Day-to-day Life among East European
A Tour of Jewish Geography in East Europe

Tuesday
A Musical History of the Yiddish Theater
Culture of Torah Judaism in East Europe
Teaching Yiddish Language and Culture in the 21st Century
Screening, “Image Before My Eyes”

Wednesday
Secrets of Jewish Genealogy Center
Treasures from the YIVO Archives
Tour of YIVO Rare Book Room
Treasures of YIVO’s EPYC Website
Transformations in the Status of Women in Eastern Europe
Yiddish Musical Heritage

Thursday
Walking Tour of a Yiddish Environment - Guided by Pearl Gluck

Washington State: Library treasures, March 16

Access to a good genealogical reference library is one benefit of joining a local Jewish genealogy society. In addition to good programming and assistance from local experts, most societies have reference libraries of essential books, journal collections and other important materials.

The JGS of Washington State's next program will feature hidden treasures from its library. The meeting takes place at 7pm, Monday, March 16, at the Stroum Jewish Community Center on Mercer Island.

The society's complete library will be on display and, in addition to browsing and researching, experts will be available to answer questions.

The JCC also offers WiFi, so bring your laptops. There will also be additional computers available for online research.

Admission: JGSWS members, free; others, $5.

For more information, click here.

Sephardi, Mizrahi: Book series, resource guide

Looking for more information on your Sephardic or Mizrahi ancestors? This 91-page guide of Sephardic studies resources seems very likely to provide good information for those just beginning a quest as well as for those who have been on this journey for some time.

The depth and breadth of list resources should provide helpful information to many researchers, regardless of experience. There are sources for Jewish history, music, genealogy, and many more interrelated topics.

The guide - "Sources for Sephardic Studies: A Library Research Guide" - was prepared byPrinceton University librarian Dr. Rachel Simon, in spring 2006.

My peeve is that none of the books on Iranian Jews were listed, although some volumes have a chapter or two.

Also, genealogists on the trail of their non-Ashkenazi ancestors will be interested in a new series of books by Indiana University Press. The Indiana Series in Sephardi and Mizrahi Studies will be edited by Hebrew University's Harvey E. Goldberg and Indiana University's Matthias B. Lehmann.

The first volumes are expected in late 2009 or early 2010. Readers with questions or proposals for the series should contact Lehmann, who is associate professor of history and Jewish studies.

The study of Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jewries has emerged as a growing and cutting-edge field within Jewish Studies. As scholars of modern Judaism have focused on new topics such as the Spanish-Portuguese Jews of the port cities in the Atlantic world or non-European Jews in the world of Islam, they have begun to reshape our understanding of the modern Jewish experience.

Older models of Jewish historiography have given way to a new, postmodern vision of Jewish history with a multicultural narrative. Jewish cultures, often referred to in the plural, are now appreciated in their diversity and as closely intertwined with the host cultures among which Jews have lived. Sephardi and Mizrahi Studies, as an interdisciplinary endeavor, have played an important role in this repositioning of Jewish Studies.

The aim is to encourage Sephardi and Mizrahi studies within Jewish Studies, as a multi-disciplinary approach including history, religious studies, anthropology, folklore, literary studies, and the arts. The broad definition will include medieval Iberian Jewry and the post-1492 Sephardi Diaspora, the Jews of the Islamic Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia.

In addition to contributing to Jewish studies, the offerings will be selected to contribute to both specific fields and to other area studies, and it appears that the series will offer information of value to genealogists.

New Journal: Iberian Judaism

"Iberia Judaica," edited by the Asociación Hispana de Estudios Hebraicos (Madrid), is an annual yearbook of some 400 pages focused on the scientific research of Iberian Judaism (from its origins through the Expulsion).

It is intended to promote research in the field. Three sections include a monograph (first issue: Jews in Al-Andalus), a text section (unedited, original or translation) and a bibliography (reviews and listing of scientific publications in the field).

The international journal accepts articles in Portuguese, Catalan, English, French, Italian, German and Latin, as well as sections in Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic.

The yearbook price is 50 Euros (Spain/Portugal); 62 Euros (EU); $105 (other countries).

For more information or to obtain a copy, contact the Asociación Hispana de Estudios Hebraicos here.

Florida: Palm Beach JGS celebrates 18th, March 11

"Arolsen: A Jewish genealogist's blessing and curse," will be presented by Arthur Tolkin at the next meeting of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Palm Beach County, which is celebrating its 18th anniversary.

The group will meet at the South County Civic Center in Delray Beach on Wednesday, March 11. The Lithuania SIG meets from 11.30am-12.30pm with Sylvia Nusinov, followed by a brief business meeting, followed by the main program.

In 2008, Tolkin and his wife spent four days at the Holocaust archives at the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen, Germany. Bad Arolsen is the most important repository in the world containing information about individual victims of World War II. He will relate his personal experiences and discuss how he used the archives to further his family research.

Tolkin is a past member of the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies board and a member of the JGSPBCI speakers' bureau. A world traveler, he has conducted many research trips to Eastern European shtetls.

For more information or directions, click here.

Texas: Galveston's Jewish immigrants, March 14

Austin residents will have a chance to see a living history one-woman show about two of the 10,000 Russian Jews who immigrated to the US through Galveston port in the early 1900s.

Jan Siegel Hart will share the tale of her grandparents, Hanna and W.H. Novit, from 2-4pm, March 14, at the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin.

Hart dresses in costume and utilizes music, props and a Russian accent for the program based on a children's book - "Hanna: The Immigrant" - she wrote about her grandmother.

She hopes to educate the audience about the difficulties of being an immigrant, of being in a place where the language was strange, where they had no friends, no home, no job. It is a story of brave people starting over in a strange land.

The program is part of the museum’s “Forgotten Gateway” exhibit, which will run through October 11, and shares stories of early Galveston immigrants. Exhibit curator Suzanne Sieriff learned about Hart through the Texas Jewish Historical Society.

The program is free (although there is a nominal charge to see the entire exhibit), seating is limited, so make reservations by calling 512-936-4649.

Philly 2009: Gesher Galicia spotlight

The first two Jewish genealogy jokes I ever heard centered on Galicia, although they are transferable to many Eastern European locations.

My grandfather would tell us that the border changed so frequently that they never knew where they were living until they went to school and heard what language the teacher spoke.

The next, origins lost in time, was of the shtetl in Galicia which found itself in Poland, and later in Ukraine. The people were happy as they said that the Polish winters were the worst and they were glad to be away from them.

Okay, okay - so they weren't the side-splitters you imagined!

In any case, many of today's Jewish genealogists have origins in Galicia. This area was Austro-Hungary, then Poland, and is now Ukraine. The shtetls of Suchastow and Skalat (southeast of Tarnopol on the map above) - home to my mother's paternal FINK family - make this group a personal interest of mine.

To learn more about Galicia, go to JewishGen for Gesher Galicia, the special interest group (SIG) devoted to this geographical area. Click here for an overview of the projects which the group is conducting.

One of the most active of the regional SIGs, its president Pamela Weisberg of Los Angeles has just announced the group's plans for the upcoming 29th IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy. There will also be other Galician programs and activities throughout the week-long conference, August 2-7, in Philadelphia.

Monday, August 3, is Gesher Galicia's major spotlight and there are some major announcements.

The SIG luncheon speaker is Michael Karpin, an award-winning filmmaker, television and radio news reporter and anchor for more than 30 years in Israel. He will discuss his new book, "Tightrope: Six Centuries of a Galician Jewish Dynasty."

The 650-year epic tale of the extraordinary Backenroth family, follows them over six centuries of upheaval, covering their migration from western to eastern Europe, the creation of the Hasidic movement, the birth of Zionism, migration to South America, the oil boom in Galicia and the loss of many family members during the Holocaust.

It is a stirring, true story, based on diaries, letters, documents, and oral testimony.

The Backenroths were residents of Drohobych, Schodnica, Boryslaw, Bolechow and other Galician shtetls. Time and time again they slid from prosperity and opulence to profound poverty and distress, and time after time they managed to surmount the crises.

Later that day, Karpin will speak on "Writing a Galician Jewish Saga: Research & Methodology."

He spent 20 years researching his book, "Tightrope," which has been described as a unique and candid history of the Jews in Galicia, interweaving stories of the Backenroth, Kahane, Wieseltier and the Graubart clans.

Beginning from the 14th century, Karpin documents their creativity, resourcefulness, deception and courage. He explains how in the course of his journalistic travels he researched the family's rabbinical dynasty and their pioneering development of the Galician oil belt in the 1800s, hunting down historical records and searching for family members throughout the world, following a trail through Lvov, Bolechow, Drohobych, Schodnica and Sanok.

That he was able to delve into archives, historical records, documents, newspaper articles, diaries, oral histories, and any and every record he could garner information from, etc., is an incredible feat, in itself which he will detail in this talk.

Set for the same day is the Gesher Galicia SIG meeting, an All-Galician Birds-of-a-Feather, and an Ask the Experts session.

The luncheon is an added-fee, ticket-only event, so remember to sign up when registering for the conference. A hint: this luncheon will likely sell out quickly, so early registration is recommended.

See you in Philly!