Seattle: Jewish genealogy society receives grant

Some time ago, Tracing the Tribe wrote about the grant program offered by Archives.com, and asked which Jewish genealogy group might be the first to receive one.

We are delighted to report that the newest $1,000 grant has been given to the Jewish Genealogical Society of Washington State (JGSWS), to allow the group to begin a digitizing project of the 120-year-old Jewish Transcript newspaper.

Anyone with roots in Seattle or other Washington state communities will find a wealth of information on the Jewish community. JGSWS has wanted to work on this digitizing project for many years but did not have the resources to carry it out.

Tracing the Tribe is especially interested to learn about our JASSEN family, which arrived in Seattle around 1923.

The pages of this venerable publication contain community news; birth, marriage and death announcements, life cycle events and historical news. Currently, the issues are in bound volumes held in the Seattle Public Library. The goal is to digitize the pages and make the records searchable online and accessible to interested researchers around the world.

For those researching Sephardic families, this publication will be of great interest as Seattle has one of the largest Sephardic communities in the US, with origins in Rhodes, Saloniki, and Turkey.

According to the Archives.com blog post:

Archives is pleased to contribute to this project which will clearly have a positive impact on anyone researching their family history in Washington State.

JGSWS President Nancy Adelson notes, "Because of this grant, Jewish Genealogical Society of Washington State will be able to start an important project that we've wanted to do for over seven years... Thank you so much for choosing us and our project! I can't tell you how much this means to the members of JGSWS and how it will help make Jewish genealogical research a bit easier."

For more information on JGSWS, view its website.

Is there a project that your group wishes to accomplish related to family history or preservation? Learn more and apply for a grant here.

Cairo Geniza: Digitizing project underway

The Cairo Geniza, with some 200,000 documents and fragments, was discovered in the late 19th-century, in Old Cairo's Ben Ezra Synagogue annex in Fustat.

It is a rich source of genealogical information as well as documents - from the 9th-14th centuries - which include rabbinical court records, leases, deeds, endowment contracts, debt acknowledgments, marriage contracts and private letters.

The collection demonstrates the history of Jews in the region during the Middle Ages as well as information on religious beliefs and practices, economic and cultural life.

Today, technology is making it possible for everyone to access these treasures as the collection is being digitized.

Autograph draft of Mishneh Torah, the legal code compiled by

the rabbinic authority, philosopher and royal physician

Moses ben Maimon (Maimonides, 1137/8-1204)

MS.Heb.d.32, fols.50b-51a

Learn more here.

The project is important because pieces of the Geniza are today in many institutions; even manuscripts were separated by single leaves and located in different places, making it difficult to understand the importance or significance of the whole item.

One major collection of 25,000 items, is at Oxford University's Bodleian Library, which possesses liturgical manuscripts and rare Talmud fragments among its holdings. These are unusual because 16th-century Europe experienced mass burnings of Talmud manuscripts.

Technology contributes to the study of these fragments and major libraries are, or have completed, digitizing their collections. The goal is to generate a worldwide database of digitized images, thereby enhancing the accessibility of the various collections and bringing them together. Other institutions involved are Cambridge University, Jewish Theological Seminary, John Ryland Library and the University of Pennsylvania.

Digital communications pioneer and philanthropist George Blumenthal of New York ( president, Center for Online Jewish Studies) and donated his organization's professional services to this project.

The ability to compare fragments in Oxford with those in Philadelphia, New York, Cambridge and Manchester will enable global scholars to access these collections and to identify matching fragments in different collections.