San Francisco: Jewish life in Tsarist Kiev, May 3

Learn about Jewish life in Tsarist-era Kiev with Natan M. Meir of Portland State University on Tuesday, May 3, at a meeting co-sponsored by the Jewish Community Library and the San Francisco Bay Area Jewish Genealogical Society.

Meir's talk - "A 'Russian Zion' or a Jewish Nightmare? Jewish Life in Tsarist Kiev" - will be presented in Russian at 4pm and in English at 7pm, at the Jewish Community Library. There is no admission fee for the two talks.

The JCL is at 1835 Ellis Street, in San Francisco; there is free parking.

From a small group of merchants in the early 1860s, the Jewish population of Kiev grew rapidly until it became one of the largest urban Jewish communities in the Russian Empire.

Meir - author of "Kiev, Jewish Metropolis: A History, 1859–1914"- will chart the growth of this vital community from its founding until the outbreak of World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution. He will discuss the external and internal challenges that it faced, including pogroms, intracommunal divisions, and the 1913 Beilis affair, in which a Ukrainian Jew was accused of ritual murder.

Meir received a Ph.D. in Jewish history from Columbia University in 2003 and is now the Lorry I. Lokey Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies at Portland State University (Oregon). He is co-editor of the recently published "Anti-Jewish Violence: Rethinking the Pogrom in East European History" and is currently working on a study of vulnerable and marginalized groups among East European Jews in the 19th century. He is a consultant for the Russian Jewish Museum of Moscow, now in its development stages.

For directions and more information, click here.