JTA: Online news archive launched

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency - known simply as JTA - has launched a free, searchable online digital archive with some 250,000 articles dating from 1923.

JTA is near and dear to Tracing the Tribe's heart as that organization, in 2006, contacted me and requested that I begin a genealogy blog. A year later, due to reorganization, Tracing the Tribe became independent.

In my talks with various JTA people over the years, I always stressed that its archives would be of immense value to genealogists and family history researchers. As plans were made to make the archive available, I was delighted.

On Tuesday night, May 3, the archive was launched at a celebration held at the Center for Jewish History, in New York.

What can you find in the archive? Here are some tidbits from just a simple search.

--The first article on the the Babi Yar massacre 
-- The founding of Israel.
-- Many articles on Jewish women through the decades.
-- The Holocaust.
-- A 1930 story on how upper class Persian Jews were becoming Bahai.
-- A 1932 story about a 1,000-year-old Polish synagogue formed by Portuguese Jews in the year 933 (Hebrew year 4693) in Wronke - on the river Warthe - in Posen.
-- A 1924 article about elections in a village near Mogilev, Belarus - spelled Mogileff in the article - named Slobodoa Davidovka, Mozyr district, and the agricultural colony Kormi, in Mogileff district.

(NOTE: There seem to be some search engine vagaries - JTA should have consulted with Steve Morse! - which the last article above showed. Searching for Mogilev did not show that election article - although there were many more modern ones. I used an old spelling, Mogileff, to see if there were other articles for the town and that spelling brought up three. A search for "Persia" showed that at some point in time, Hamadan was spelled Amadan and Isfahan was Ispahan (useful information for future searches). A phonetic parameter would be a useful addition to the search engine. For now, if you know other spellings of the towns you are looking for, try all of them.

However, you can search by keyword, by date/decades, and there are additional search tips. You can also save your searches by registering at the archive. It's free; click the Sign Up logo on the upper right of the archive home page. Do check out your ancestral towns, surnames and more!)

JTA was founded in 1917 towards the end of World War I by Jacob Landau to transmit vital information about what was happening in Jewish communities around the world. It was originally called the Jewish Correspondence Bureau and, was the first news agency that gathered and also disseminated news around the globe.

JTA correspondents, since that date, have reported what they could confirm at the time, although some facts in their articles were later corrected through research. Events covered by the agency would never have been documented.

The JTA Jewish News Archive is a powerful reference tool that offers a perspective on current events and modern Jewish history that is not available anywhere else. With free access to nearly a century of reporting about global events affecting world Jewry, the Archive will not only serve as a rich resource for both the casually curious as well as students and scholars of modern Jewish history, it will also transform the way the next generation of Jewish leaders and activists learn about their heritage.

Until now, there has been no authoritative site that provides a comprehensive chronicle of modern Jewish history, as seen through the eyes of journalists. From the aftermath of World War I, to the rise of Nazi Germany, through the Holocaust, the creation of the modern State of Israel and right up to today, JTA journalists have been reporting on stories and issues affecting Jews around the globe. The JTA Jewish News Archive holds over a quarter-million articles They provide a unique lens through which to view world events that no other news organization provides.

Read the bulletins that were sent out during the Holocaust and see the information that was available, contrary to conventional wisdom that said Americans didn't know about that tragedy while it was happening.

The digital archive effort was spearheaded by Brandeis University professor of American Jewish history Jonathan Sarna, who is also a JTA board member. He said that "The JTA Jewish News Archive has the potential to spark an interest in the past that will transform the future."

According to a JTA article, the nonprofit Digital Divide Data helped create the archive. The group serves Southeast Asian disadvantaged youth. Young Cambodians digitized the files.

The effort was also supported by the Gottesman Fund; The Righteous Persons Foundation; The Charles H. Revson Foundation; Elisa Spungen Bildner and Robert Bildner, in honor of Norma Spungen; George S. Blumenthal; and the Grace and Scott Offen Charitable Fund.

See a video about the archive here.

Lithuania: Cemetery dispute settled

JTA reported that the Vilnius Jewish cemetery dispute has been settled.

Read the article here.

A long-running dispute over construction on the site of a historic Jewish cemetery in Lithuania was settled on August 26. It will provide protection to the Snipiskes cemetery in the center of Vilnius. The cemetery was in active use from the 16th-19th centuries.

Most of the site was destroyed during the Nazi occupation, and a sports center was built over part of it during the Soviet era.

In 2005, an apartment and office complex construction on the site set off worldwide Jewish protests. The Lithuanian government permission for the construction was condemned in a motion by the U.S. House of Representatives.

Buildings on the site will however not be demolished. The agreement set official boundaries for the cemetery site.

Signing off on the plan were The Committee for the Preservation of Jewish Cemeteries in Europe, the Lithuanian Jewish Community and the Vilnius Cultural Heritage Protection Department, according to the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz.

The Jewish community rejected a compensation plan offered by Lithuania for Nazi-seized Jewish communal buildings which were held by the Soviets and never returned. Lithuania offered $53 million over 10 years beginning in 2012, but the community said the amount is only one-third of the buildings' value.

Sign up for breaking news alerts at JTA.org.

JTA: Genealogy and technology story

As many Tracing the Tribe readers know, the blog was started at the request, in 2006, of JTA.org, a century-old international Jewish news agency.

Today's JTA.org Daily Briefing listed "Technology transforming genealogy research" as the first story. How could I resist?

Hillel Kutler wrote the very good story which spotlighted genealogy and technology. I knew he was working on it, but I didn't expect to be named in the second paragraph. That certainly made my day. Thanks, Hillel!

I'm also delighted that my good friend and researcher Maria Jose also made it in. She has done excellent work for many of today's researchers looking for their Sephardic roots, including Jeff Malka (SephardicGen.com), Judy Simon and others.

At a workshop she ran a few years ago in Barcelona on the role of technology in conducting genealogy research, Dardashti met a former attorney, Maria Jose Surribas. Surribas now works as a freelance genealogist and has helped Dardashti research her roots in the Catalonian town of Lerida.

Dardashti now can trace her family there to 1353, to Moshe Talalaya, a kosher winemaker.

“If not for technology, we’d be doing what we used to: dealing with the dust and the creepy-crawlies, like Maria does in Spain, wearing a face mask,” said Dardashti, of Tel Aviv, who writes Tracing the Tribe: The Jewish Genealogy Blog (tracingthetribe.blogspot.com).

“Technology has made it possible for people interested in the same topics to share, collaborate and learn.”

The story also extensively quotes my colleague at MyHeritage.com, Daniel Horowitz:

“Until now history and genealogy, which are related, are things that old people were said to be doing,” said Daniel Horowitz, manager of genealogy and translations for My Heritage, an Israeli software and Web company that operates in 36 languages.

That reality is changing, he said, as modern tools make learning about the past cooler.

“Definitely, technology plays a very important role in bringing young people into genealogy,” Horowitz said. “Once the computer and technology are used to research or share information, young people are attracted to it. The amount of young people getting involved in things like Facebook -- it’s incredible. In Israel, there’s a Facebook for kids 12-15 years old. That’s a very good catch to bring young people into genealogy.”

There are comments from other Philly 2009 conference attendees, and additional information as well.

Read the complete story at the link above.

Bloggers: Now we're a scare tactic?

Due to holiday preparations, I'm a bit behind in reading my e-mail. Today's messages included delightful and dismaying news.

There were three emails from President Elisa Spungen Bildner of JTA.org. They appeared to be solicitation letters aimed at different segments of readers. I don't have a problem with funding requests - we all know what it's like out there. However, the one titled "The Future of Jewish Storytelling," offered this phrase:

"Without a strong JTA, the storytelling will be left to bloggers, twitterers, and non-professionals. Is this the best way for our future Jewish stories to be told and recorded?"

What? Come again?

As the author of JTA's very first blog (Tracing the Tribe) back in 2006, I wondered what she was thinking when she wrote that? Is it possible to be that out of touch with digital media and the blogosphere?

Of course, just five minutes before, I had learned that Tracing the Tribe was ranked #10 in the 25 most popular genealogy blogs of 2009, listed by Progenealogists.com. This blog got its start at JTA, and I have always been grateful for that impetus, but I was really confused by the letter.

I checked JTA where I found this response by digital media editor Dan Sieradski, in part:

I will therefore be the first to admit that Friday's fundraising letter was ill-advised and regrettable. The characterization of bloggers and Twitterers as "non-professional" and unreliable was not only counterproductive but arguably false. Worse yet, by seemingly attacking the blogosphere and Twittersphere, JTA has turned itself into a straw man in the battle between old and new media.

And - because I was a bit late to this - I also found Elisa Spungen Bildner's apology, in part:

A fundraising email appeal JTA sent out Friday under my signature contained words I did not specifically approve, words that seemed to criticize bloggers and Twitterers. Understandably, they ruffled a few feathers in the blogosphere.

She didn't read her words before someone hit the button? "Seemed" to criticize bloggers and Twitterers? Ruffled a "few" feathers?

Somehow her apology sounds less sincere than Dan's - perhaps because he was a very active blogger and understands the blogosphere. His full apology details the fact that JTA's blogs are actually its top-viewed content and it has launched its own blog aggregator to highlight Jewish bloggers' content.

As a journalist who began blogging at JTA's request nearly three years ago, I'm sort of in the middle.

In any case, I went looking for more on the blogosphere's reaction to the letter and found it. The talented Esther Kustanowitz was (I believe) the second blogger invited to JTA in 2006, and she summed it up nicely (read her complete post here); here's some of "Jewish bloggers are not the enemies of Jewish storytelling."

... But this particular email, headed "The Future of Jewish Storytelling," seemed to be using bloggers (and Twitterers) as a scare tactic designed to elicit donations, the way other organizations use terms like “aging Holocaust population,” “Jewish singles crisis,” and “rise in anti-Semitism.”

Unless you act now, the message seemed to say, “bloggers, Twitterers, and nonprofessionals” will take over Jewish journalism entirely and (the ultimate implied leap from any scare tactic used in Jewish fundraising) cause the demise of the Jewish people.

But that couldn’t be what they were saying, could it? I used to blog for the JTA. I've watched with delight as the site revamped its look and content, including blogging and Twitter as two additional tools in the arsenal of Jewish journalism. ...

... In speaking with a friend and fellow blogger about this email, it became clear that JTA sent at least two versions of their solicitation letter today. I got the one that must have been designated for Jewish education professionals, while hers seemed to have a business edge, invoking the "instant journalism" and fast-changing "news business," as well as a mention of Bloomberg News and the noticeable absence of both Passover imagery and blogger/Twitter denigration. The email's title: "The Info You Need, When You Need It."

"The Info You Need, When You Need It" - why not stick with that as a service motto, instead of resorting to threats or scare tactics? Demonizing a group of people who are united only in one characteristic - the technology they use to ensure that their stories are heard - constructs unnecessary barriers between mainstream media and the communications wave of the present.

If you ask me, the news, personal reflections or opinions that resonate with people who blog or Tweet or Digg or Facebook message are becoming - as much as any piece of current news or element of our written history - a vital part of our Jewish storytelling, for the present and future.

Jewish bloggers are not the enemies of Jewish storytelling: if anything, as bickering, economic collapse and technological confusion compete for communal attention, they just might be its salvation.

But what do I know? I'm just a blogger.

Esther hit it on the head.