New York: The Tree of Life, June 12

A film - "Tree of Life" - on a Jewish Italian family will be the focus of the next Jewish Genealogy Society of New York on Sunday, June 12.

The film celebrates the passion for life, love and family that unites Jews and Italians, as Israeli-born director Hava Volterra traces her roots in Ancona, Italy.

Beginning in the ancient Adriatic city of Ancona, Volterra and her feisty 82-year old Aunt Viviana travel extensively through Italy, digging up rare historical manuscripts, interviewing an array of quirky historians, and discovering the astonishing and humorous stories of their ancestors, including the da Volterra family of bankers in Florence of the Medici; Ramhal, a Venetian rabbi and mystic involved in the Kabbalah; renowned scientist and mathematician Vito Volterra; New York City’s legendary mayor Fiorello LaGuardia; and Luigi Luzzatti, Italy’s first Jewish prime minister.

The program - a joint meeting of the JGSNY and the Primo Levi Society - begins at 2pm at the Center of Jewish History, 15 W. 16th Street, Manhattan. The Levi Society's deputy director Allesandro Cassin will facilitate the post-screening discussion of this personal family saga that illuminates the fascinating history of Italian Jewish people.

Admission: JGSNY members, free; others, $5.

Read the NJ Jewish Standard's review here, and a review in The Forward here.

Australia: False Holocaust memoir?

Forensic genealogist Dr. Colleen Fitzpatrick is featured in an Australian story concerning allegations that a wartime memoir is false.

The Herald Sun story on Alex Kurzem, 75, who authored an international best-selling book ("The Mascot") describes the investigation by Fitzpatrick and her team.

She was instrumental in exposing Holocaust fakes Misha Defonseca and Herman Rosenblat some three years ago. Defonseca was forced to admit that "Surviving with Wolves" was false, and Rosenblat confessed he made up much of his "Angel at the Fence."

Kurzem has refused the newspaper's offer "to organise and pay for medical and DNA tests to help prove his identity and whether or not he is Jewish." He has refused unless he is paid $100,000 to undergo those tests.

His book allegedly describes his life as a Russian Jewish child, age 5, who survived the Holocaust by becoming the mascot of a Latvian military unit. The story was an award-winning 2004 ABC documentary and a movie about his life is being made by a French company.

According to the news story, Dr. Fitzpatrick's team also includes Melbourne Holocaust Centre senior staff and US psychologist Dr. Barry Resnick. Their files detail doubt about Kurzem, which has sparked three investigations by the Jewish Claims Conference, the German government compensation and pension department and the US Attorney's office.

Kurzem claims he watched his Jewish mother and siblings executed by the Nazis.

Read the complete story at the link above.

JDC Archive: Finding gold!

Looking for lost relatives? Try the searchable, online archive of the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) launched earlier this week. Even more documents will be added during the summer.

Read about the goldmine of records in an NPR story, which mentions the work of volunteer transcribers and how the past president of the Jewish Genealogical Society of New York - Linda Cantor - found a relative.

JDC has made a collection of its historic records and photographs from the Holocaust period available online on its Shared Legacy website. During and after WWII, the organization cared for hundreds of thousands of Jews in many places around the world. JDC supported Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler in Kobe, Japan until 1941, and supported Jewish refugees in Yokohama (1918-20), most fleeing Russia. It supplied free parcels to thousands of Jewish individuals and families in the Soviet Union, 1943-45. And that's only scratching the surface.

JDC was also active in Iran until 1978 or so. It supported schools, an old-age home, kindergartens and the Jewish hospital, particularly in the 1950s and earlier. But this current collection focuses on Holocaust records.

The online database has more than 500,000 names; more will be added. There are some 1,500 photos from 14 countries - readers help in tagging the photos is sought.

Among those receiving assistance from the JDC was number 665 on page 2 of a list of beneficiaries of JDC’s free parcel service in the Soviet Union, 1943-1945:

There is a list of more than 6,300 individuals and families who received these packages. An addendum lists name and address changes for those in the main list. This was an interesting find in their new online archives.

When searching for BANK, my maternal great-grandmother's family near Kovno, my first search brought up a list of 270 names -  but only a few were Bank, many others were Band, Blank and others. There is no provision for "exact" searches.

I tried to go through the many pages, clicking on names to see the birthplaces of individuals in various lists, but when I tried to return to the search results there was often an error page ("There are no results matching your query. SEARCH AGAIN"). Whether this is due to high traffic, I don't yet know. I tried several times, sometimes reaching the list, more often not.

A second try brought up the list again. People were listed as going to Uruguay, Australia, the US and many other locations. I haven't yet found any on the list from around Kovno, but I'll keep looking.

For FINK (my maternal grandfather), there were some 135 results with geographical locations of Shanghai, Israel, Brazil, Australia and more. Some were from Galicia - I was looking for Skalat and Suchostaw and have not found those yet, although I did find Grybow, Lemberg (Lviv) and other towns I knew relatives had lived in, according to JRI-Poland.org.

Tracing the Tribe believes this information may be a goldmine for many researchers. Unfortunately, the search engine is far from ideal. Where is Steve Morse and his One Step programs when we need him?

To search properly through these valuable records, there should be provisions for "sounds like," "begins with," "exact," etc. To avoid going through a list of hundreds of names, it would have been good to put the person's birthplace with his or her name in the list of results. Thus, a search could be narrowed down more usefully. There should be a way to search for birthplace or other geographical locations to narrow down results for a more practical search. There is only one search field - last name or first and last name.

To see what JDC has done in its history, click here for a roundup by decades.

This is a very valuable collection of records but somewhat difficult to negotiate because of the current search engine. So grab yourself a cup of something, and settle down for a long search.

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.

Holocaust: New victims' assets database

A comprehensive archive of Jewish Holocaust victims' assets has been made public. The searchable, user-friendly database - known as Project HEART (Holocaust Era Asset Restitution Taskforce) - will help victims and heirs reacquire losses.

The database may also assist genealogists and family history researchers to learn more about their families.

The database includes property addresses, insurance policies, lists of homeowners, professions, lists of known confiscated properties, business directories, and other archival information that can assist potential applicants in their research.

Archivists plan to release several million records, making the database the international community’s largest single-source database of lost Jewish property assets from the Holocaust era.

Project HEART unveiled yesterday an initial set of archival records, in the presence of American Jewish community leaders.

The press release stressed the availability of new technologies in this cause.

“These new technological tools together with the official involvement of the State of Israel in this process give us the hope that this time things will be different," said Natan Sharansky.

"As a former Prisoner of Zion, I remember the difficulty that existed in transferring information in the Soviet Union. In the age of the Internet, Google and Facebook allow us to create magnificent revolutions. Project HEART’s website has received more than 700,000 hits during its first few weeks.

According to the press release:

NEW YORK, May 4, 2011 – A large-scale international effort to help Jewish victims of the Holocaust redress claims of lost property confiscated, looted or forcibly sold under the Nazi regime was jumpstarted this week with the unveiling of a large, publicly available and searchable database of more than 650,000 Holocaust era property records in its first release.

The records were compiled and made available by Project HEART (Holocaust Era Asset Restitution Taskforce), an initiative of the Jewish Agency, in cooperation and with the support of the Government of Israel, to help Jewish families identify personal property confiscated by the Nazis and to help victims seek restitution. ...

... Launched in late February, 2011, Project HEART seeks to identify Jewish Holocaust victims and their heirs worldwide whose families owned real estate, movable, immovable, or other intangible personal property that was confiscated, looted, or forcibly sold in countries governed or occupied by the Nazi forces or Axis powers during the Holocaust era. The only limitation for application is if a post-war settlement already has been made to a victim or the victim’s heirs for that property. In such cases, people are not eligible to apply to Project HEART regarding that property.

To participate, individuals need to fill out the questionnaire available on HEART’s website, www.heartwebsite.org. Since it was launched, details about Project HEART’s purpose and the application process have been translated into 13 languages, and a 24-hour call center is operational in all languages. To date, the project has received tens of thousands of requests for additional information."

For more information, click Project HEART's website.

Southern California: Gurs concentration camp, May 1

Holocaust Memorial Day will be commemorated by the Jewish Genealogical Society of the Conejo Valley (JGSCV) on Sunday, May 1.

Speaker Werner Frank will speak on this little-known first massive Jewish deportation to Camp de Gurs in 1940.

The meeting - co-sponsored with Temple Adat Elohim - runs from 1.30-3.30pm, at 2420 E. Hillcrest Drive, Thousand Oaks. There is no admission fee.

Gauleiters Robert Wagner and Joseph Bürckel, administrative heads of the States of Baden and the Pfalz/Saar, sought to be the first among their Nazi cohorts to make their territories Judenrein (free of Jews). They had engineered a massive expulsion of over 6,500 Jews to Camp de Gurs, located in unoccupied Vichy France. The event became known as the Wagner-Bürckel Aktion and was offered by the Gauleiters as their gift to the Führer on October 23, 1940.

The relocation of Jews to the Gurs concentration camp became only an intermediate step prior to the infamous "Final Solution" which was pronounced in January 1942. This Nazi inspired annihilation program triggered yet a second round of transports that would move the incarcerated from Gurs to the Parisian suburb of Drancy, an assembly point where the victims faced a final deportation to the death camp of Auschwitz.

Frank will delve into the background of the historical events that led to the Aktion, and recount the impact of this cataclysm on his hometown of Eppingen, as he relates the tribulations and ultimate fate encountered by his widely located family in the State of Baden.

He is a founding member, former board member, former JGSCV newsletter, and a member of JGSLA. He was one of the founders of GERSIG (the German Special Interest Group of JewishGen) and has written articles for ROOTS, Maajan, Avotaynu and Stammbaum.

He has been researching his family’s history, amassing a genealogical database of more than 33,000 names, and published his family history ("Legacy: The Saga of a German-Jewish Family over Time and Circumstance," Avotaynu 2003).

For more information and directions, click here.

Sacramento: 'The French Connection,' April 17

On the menu at the next meeting of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Sacramento is the "French Connection," with Susanne Levitsky, on Sunday, April 17.

The program begins at 10am, at Albert Einstein Residence Center, 1935 Wright St., Sacramento.

A third-generation Californian whose great-grandfather arrived in California from France in 1870 and settled in Yolo County, Susanne will speak on her family's emigration and trace their lives through WWII. She will also discuss the fate of many French Jews during the war.

She will include her trip to France last fall and offer some suggestions for Jewish visitors to Paris.

In the fourth grade, Susanne began writing to a French cousin and became interested in genealogy through handwritten family trees compiled by French relatives. She spent a year in college at the University of Bordeaux and has returned to France numerous times to visit relatives and track down more details of her family's history.

For more information, click on the Jewish Genealogical Society of Sacramento.

Washington DC: 'Women in WWII,' dual program, April 17

Women in World War II is the topic in a dual program presented by the Jewish Genealogy Society of Greater Washington on Sunday, April 17.

The program is in two parts at Beth El Hebrew Congregation, 3830 Seminary Road, Alexandria, Virgina.

From 11am-1pm, the first part is an intermediate workshop on "Women's World War II Resistance," presented by Patti Maslinoff. It is open only to JGSGW members and is free.

Following a short business meeting, the second part begins at 1.30pm. Davi Walders will read from her book and tell the stories of women throughout Europe whose heroic acts fighting fascism during the Holocaust saved thousands of lives. This part is free to JGSGW members and first-time attendees ($5 for others).

See below for more details on both programs.

Maslinoff's program - My Journey in Genealogy: Tips, How-To's & Rewards - is a two-hour multimedia presentation packed with resources, helpful hints and motivation for genealogists primarily at the intermediate level, although she says even beginners will find much information useful.

She will share some insights, joys and frustrations from 15 years of researching family history.

Included will be techniques she developed for improving research, data collection, organization and presentation, with valuable tips that only come from experience. Also in the presentation is a focus on digital technology and its tools, such as scanners and new software that can help make unreadable documents more legible.

Maslinoff will demonstrate video and audio clips during her own genealogical journey, and will discuss preparation for and conducting video-recorded oral history interviews. Attendees will learn about common mistakes made by beginners intermediate and even advanced researchers.

Ms. Maslinoff’s effusive enthusiasm and involvement with Jewish genealogy will be a motivation to all attendees. She teaches detective skills that will enable us to uncover the records, facts and other information about our families that generate those thrilling “Aha” moments that we treasure. Registration: Pre-registration required. Class is limited to 40 students. Register here

The main program -Women’s World War II Resistance - with writer and educator Davi Walders, will discuss what led her to research and write a moving collection of stories about woman throughout Europe whose heroic acts fighting fascism during the Holocaust saved thousands of lives.

She will read from her newly-published book ("Woman Against Tyranny: Poems of Resistance During the Holocaust;" Clemson University Digital Press).

The book tells the stories of Jewish, Christian and Muslim women who resisted in many ways, from helping others escape, to parachuting into hostile territory, to providing translation support and many other actions.

She will share stories of those who survived and those who perished - known as well as unknown. Included are Dr. Rita Levi-Montalcini, Emilie Schindler, Baroness Germaine de Rothschild and others.

The session will address the question of why women's stories are so often unknown. Walders spent 15 years researching, traveling, and writing this collection. These women’s stories take place in such countries as Germany, Poland, France, Yugoslavia, Denmark, Slovakia, Albania, Greece, and elsewhere. The session will include discussion and a book-signing.

Walders' poetry and prose have appeared in more than 200 publications including CCAR Journal, Conservative Judaism, JOFA Journal, Judaism, Lilith and Midstream. She received Hadassah of Greater Washington's Myrtle Wreath Award for her work at NIH and its Children's Inn. For more biographical information, click here.

For more information and directions, click on the JGSGW website.

Seattle: 'Jews, Genetics & the DNA Shoah Project,' April 11

"Jews, Genetics, and the DNA Shoah Project" with Matthew Kaplan is the next program of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Washington State, on Monday, April 11.

Doors open at 7pm for the 7.30pm program at the Stroum Jewish Community Center, 3801 East Mercer Way, Mercer Island. Admission: Free for JGSWS members and one guest per year; others, $5.

Kaplan will present research findings from studies of Jewish genetics and Jewish population history. He’ll start with a short review of some basic principles of human genetics and the biology behind DNA testing.

He'll also talk about the DNA Shoah Project, a unique humanitarian effort to reunite survivors of the Holocaust.

Following the lecture there will be time for questions. Volunteers will be on hand to assist those interested in contributing their DNA (free) to the DNA Shoah Project.

Kaplan is a staff scientist at the University of Arizona Genetics Core laboratory (UAGC), which provides genetic testing services for academic researchers and the private sector. He personally developed the genetic testing pipeline for FamilyTreeDNA, the leader in the genetic genealogy field.

The laboratory currently provides genetic testing services for FamilyTreeDNA and for public participants of National Geographic’s and IBM’s Genographic Project.

Kaplan has worked with Dr. Michael Hammer on research projects using the Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA to investigate the population genetics and population history of Jewish populations for more than 10 years. Kaplan and Hammer are working together on the DNA Shoah Project.

For more information and directions, see the JGSWS website.

New York: 'Jews of the Balkans," preserving memories, March 31

The Central Europe Center for Research and Documentation - known as Centropa - is headed by Edward Serotta in Vienna, Austria. Serotta informed Tracing the Tribe about recent events.

Serotta will speak on the Jews of the Balkans talk at the Center for Jewish History on March 31 in New York City, presented by the American Sephardi Federation and YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. The title is "Images of a Lost World: Pictures and stories of Balkan Sephardic life from the Centropa.org interviews."

An exhibit in the Constantiner Gallery opens at 6.30pm, while Serotta will speak at 7.15pm on using new technologies to preserve Jewish memory.

Seventy years ago this spring, Nazi Germany invaded Yugoslavia and Greece, then set about destroying the Jewish communities that had been in this region since the expulsion from Spain in 1492 (in some cases, even longer).

Between 2001 and 2008, Centropa interviewed 200 elderly Sephardic Jews in Bulgaria, Bosnia, Serbia, Macedonia, Turkey and Greece. Rather than use video in its interviews, Centropa digitized 4,000 family photographs. Rather than concentrating on how Jews were murdered during the Shoah,

Centropa’s interviews are much more about how Jews lived--before, during and after the Shoah. This exhibition is comprised of pictures and stories from these interviews. All texts in this exhibition are in both English and Spanish.

Following the opening of the exhibit, Serotta will present a talk on how his institute has preserved Sephardic Balkan Jewish memory.

Born in Savannah, Georgia in 1949, he has lived in Berlin, Budapest and Austria since 1988. He has authored books and documentaries.

He presented a similar talk in Los Angeles. Read the LA Times article here.

A recent Philadelphia seminar for some 30 educators, organized by Centropa, was covered by the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent.

For more information on Centropa, click here.

Denver: Border changes & migration routes, February 27

Do you know how border changes impacted your ancestors? How did they find their way to the boats that would carry them to new worlds?

"Chasing Border Changes and The Choice of Migration Routes for 20th Century Eastern European Jews" with Dr. David Shneer PhD, will begin at 10am on Sunday, February 27, at the Jewish Community Center, Denver. There is no fee.

When American Ashkenazi Jews think of their migration stories, they almost always involve a small town in contemporary Poland or Ukraine, a boat across an ocean, and a story of triumph in the new world. What about those Jews who took trains to other places in Eastern Europe like Moscow, Kharkov, Lodz, or Budapest? In this lecture, we will learn more about Jewish migration patterns, changing European country borders and ask how the mass emigration of many of our relatives fits into a larger story about Jewish migration throughout Eastern Europe.

David Shneer is associate professor of history and director of Jewish Studies at University of Colorado at Boulder.

His newest book project - "Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, & the Holocaust" - looks at the lives and works of two dozen World War II military photographers to examine what kinds of photographs they took when they encountered evidence of Nazi genocide on the Eastern Front.

Shneer has lived and worked as a scholar and writer in Russia, Germany, and Israel and has written for the New York Times, Huffington Post, Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post as well as magazines dedicated to Jewish life and culture, including The Forward, Pakntreger, Jewcy, and Nextbook.

He has served as the Resnick Fellow at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Stern Senior Scholar at the South African Holocaust Foundation.

For more information, view the JGSCo website.

Washington DC: USHMM Babi Yar lecture, February 9

Babi Yar (Ukraine), the site of mass murder near Kiev, is the subject of the annual Shapiro annual lecture at the USHMM, on Sunday, February 9.

Babi Yar in Kiev is the site of the largest single Nazi shooting of Jews in the Soviet Union and Ukraine’s largest mass grave of Nazi victims. Drawing from newly available sources, Dr. Karel C. Berkhoff will discuss the process of mass murder, the response of the victims and others, and the treatment of the ravine since 1945.

The program - "Babi Yar: Site of Mass Murder, Ravine of Oblivion" - runs from 7-8.30pm in the Helena Rubinstein Auditorium.

Speaker Karel C. Berkhoff is Associate Professor at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and teaches at the University of Amsterdam, where he is coordinator of the Holocaust and Genocide Studies track of the MA program in history.

He is the author of "Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule" (2004), which won the 2001 Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History, Category A, and has published several scholarly articles on the Holocaust in Ukraine.

A reception follows the lecture. Reservations are requested; RSVP online.

Book: British Library's Yizkor book holdings

Readers interested in yizkor books may wish to acquire Ilana Tahan's book, "Memorial Volumes to Jewish Communities Destroyed in the Holocaust: A bibliography of British library holdings."

The 2004 first edition volume, which catalogs some 306 yizkor books, is available for $15 at Henry Hollander, Bookseller, in San Francisco, California.

The description reads:

London, The British Library, 2004. First Edition. ISBN: 0-7123-4820-4. Royal octavo, black cloth with gold lettering, color frontispiece photo, xiv, 89 pp., b/w photos, Communities by Current Location, Memorial Volumes by Language of Publication, Memorial Volumes by Year of Publication, Memorial Volumes by Country of Publications, index of Authors, Editors and Translators of Memorial Volumes in the section organized by localities, index of Authors and Editors of Memorial Books in the sections organized by Countries and Regions and in the Encyclopedia Volumes, index of Towns and Villages, index of Variant Spellings, List of Abbreviations, Selective Bibliography. Hardbound. Very Good. Introduction by Martin Gilbert. 306 volumes are cataloged. (54275).

Contact Henry Hollander if you are interested.

Colorado: Yizkor books for Jewish family history, January 30

Yizkor books are an important component of Jewish family history, providing information on families in and history of towns and cities impacted by the Holocaust.

The Jewish Genealogical Society of Colorado will focus on Yizkor books when it hosts University of Maryland doctoral candidate Rachel Leah Jablon on Sunday, January 30.

The program begins at 10am at Congregation Har Shem, 3950 Baseline Road, South Building, in Boulder.

Jablon's program is titled "Yizkor Books: Required Reading for Reseaching Jewish Family History."

Yizkor books, or Jewish memorial books, offer Jewish genealogists a goldmine of information on ancestors, places of origin, religious movements, industrial trends, and Holocaust history. This presentation will cover the history and historiography of Yizkor books: what they are, when they came to be, where they come from, why they were published, who put them together, and how to use them. Because Yizkor books are hard to obtain, we will primarily use the Internet to "page through" digital, scanned-in versions of Yizkor books and their translations. A list of repositories which hold Yizkor books around the world will be provided. If you have any Yizkor books, please bring them to the presentation to show.

Jablon's dissertation - "Digital Legacies: Community, the Holocaust, and the Internet" - examines the influence of Jewish genealogy on Holocaust memorialization, especially in an online environment. She served as Denver University's Posen Visiting Lecturer of Secular Jewish Culture in 2006 and as the Holocaust Awareness Institute's Scholar-in-Residence in 2007.

For more information and directions visit the JGSCo website.

MyHeritage.com: Reuniting a family after 70 years

Here's a great story of Jewish family connections linking branches in Russia and the US some 70 years after all communication had ended.

It gives hope to all families impacted by history

David Greenberg and Grigori Yafet/Jafet were reconnected using the MyHeritage.com Smart Match feature. Ancestral towns mentioned are Kaunas (Kovno), Kedainai (Kedain), families are RUBENSHTEYN, RELKIN, GREENBERG, JAFET/YAFET,

David Greenberg has been researching his family history for nearly 40 years, all this time believing that a large part of his family had perished during the Holocaust. So you can imagine how David was ‘‘flat out speechless’’ to discover otherwise, thanks to a Smart Match on MyHeritage.com.

This is a tale of how fate divided a family, and how MyHeritage helped reunite it.

Read the complete story here and see some wonderful photographs.

A reunion is planned in March in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Long Island NY: Primo Levi lecture, February 12

A lecture on Primo Levi and the Holocaust in Italy, by Professor Stanislao G. Pugliese, will be hosted by the Italian Genealogical Group on Saturday, February 12.

The meeting begins at 10.30am at the Bethpage Public Library, 47 Powel Avenue, Bethpage, NY. There is no admission fee.

Distinguished Professor of Italian and Italian American Studies at Hofstra University, Pugliese is a specialist on the Italian anti-Fascist Resistance and Italian Jews. He has written numerous books.

Among his works is the edited collection of essays, "The Legacy of Primo Levi" (MacMillan):

These essays examine how Primo Levi has influenced the fields of philosophy, politics, and ethics, offering provocative comparisons with Dante, Giorgio Agamben, Franz Kafka, Emmanuel Levinas, Viktor Frankl, and Elie Wiesel. Topics include Levi's anti-fascism; the influence of Judaism on his thinking and writing; Levi's poetry and linguistics; the problem of memory and representation; the concept of the "gray zone"; and the controversy surrounding Levi's death. A unique perspective on the life and work of a writer who powerfully reminds us of what transpired in the extermination camps of Europe and what it means to be human after Auschwitz.

Visit the Italian Genealogical Group.

Latvia: 100 tombstones desecrated

Latvia's president condemned an attack on a Riga cemetery Wednesday.

President Vadis Zalters urged police to find the perpetrators - who desecrated some 100 tombstones with Nazi symbols - quickly, according to the European Jewish Press website. Other officials, including the prime minister and foreign minister, also blasted the attack.

Earlier Wednesday, state police spokeswoman Ieva Reksna told AFP that police officers had found around 100 tombstones spattered with white-paint swastikas.
   

A guard at the cemetery -- the only working Jewish burial ground in Riga -- spotted the defiled tombstones on Wednesday morning, Reksna said.  

Officials from Riga city council headed to the cemetery after news of the attack emerged, and mayor Nils Usakovs, who is on a visit to Russia, issued a statement condemning it.
   

Municipal police have now been ordered to boost patrols at the site.

The cemetery was also attacked in September 2003, following which five teens were sentenced to prison terms of from six months to three years.
   

Today, the Latvian Jewish community numbers less than 10,000 individuals in the general population of 2.2 million.

Prior to WWII, some 85,000 Jews lived there; 70,000 were murdered in Latvia or perished after deportation to concentration camps.     

Virginia: Lost town of Trochenbrod, Dec. 12

Learn about the "lost town" of Trochenbrod with author Avrom Bendavid-Val, at the next meeting of the Jewish Genealogy Society of Greater Washington on Sunday, December 12.

The program begins at 1pm at Beth El Hebrew Congregation, 3830 Seminary Road, Alexandria, Virginia. Members, free; others, $5.

A Washington DC resident, Bendavid-Val's book - "The Heavens are Empty: Discovering the Lost Town of Trochenbrod" - is the result of 12 years of research. He made nine visits to the site where the town once stood and its environs.

It contains first-person accounts, photographs and maps. The focus is on the vibrant town life, not just on its destruction.

Settlement of the village that became Trochenbrod started in the early 1800s in a small clearing in the forest in what is today northwest Ukraine. Jews began settling there and farming because under Czarist decrees, only by doing that could they avoid oppressive anti-Jewish laws, including having their sons conscripted to serve in the Russian army until age 45. As Trochenbrod grew to its final population of about 5,000, it became the only free-standing town created, populated, and self-governed entirely by Jews ever to exist outside the biblical Land of Israel.  Trochenbrod became a thriving regional commercial center that had a highly diversified and largely self-sufficient economy.

Trochenbrod was "a magical place,” according to the memoir of one visitor in the 1930s, a feeling echoed by the few Trochenbrod natives who survive. It was the only town to completely and permanently vanish in the Holocaust.  In August and September 1942, Nazis and their helpers murdered the people of Trochenbrod. The town had been created by anti-Semitism and it was destroyed by anti-Semitism. Because there had been none but Jews in Trochenbrod, no one was left there, and all traces of the town soon vanished.

 A book sale and signing will follow his presentation.

Miami: Sharing two life stories, Dec, 5

There are always two sides of a story.

The next program of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Greater Miami - on Sunday, December 5 - will demonstrate this old adage.

The meeting begins at 10am at the Greater Miami Jewish Federation, 4200 Biscayne Boulevard. There is free, secure parking.

Speaker Dr. Bernd Wolschlaeger's autobiography, "A German Life," demonstrates his two life stories and how history can both impact and devastate a family.

His first story tells of his life as the Christian son of a WWII German highly decorated tank commander who fought in Poland, France, and Russia and who received the Iron Cross personally from Adolf Hitler.

His second story is of becoming an officer in the Israeli Defense Forces, converting to Judaism, moving to Israel, marrying a Jewish woman and having two children.

In his quest to find answers to questions about his parents and his nation's past, Bernd set out to find the truth and, in doing so, found a new life.

His attraction to Judaism created a turmoil within him that centered somewhere between personal guilt for what had taken place and a true sense of belonging to a people and their beliefs. When his children began asking about his parents and his past, he made the decision to tell them the truth about his family and his upbringing. He wanted them to understand what so dramatically changed his life, to give them a sense of knowing their family history in a way that was different from his own experience.

Sharing with them in this way caused him to explore his relationship with his father, and how that relationship was overshadowed by the Holocaust and everything associated with it.

Today, he is a family physician in North Miami Beach, Florida, and was past president of the Dade County Medical Association. A question and answer session will follow.

The society's annual Hanukah celebration and gift exchange follows. Guests and friends are always welcome. There is no admission fee.

For more information, see the JGS Greater Miami website.

Hungary, Austria: 'Spirit of Gradisce' website

Areas of western Hungary have been part of Austria since 1921. A website offers Jewish history and information about this geographical region.

Established by the former editor of the American Burgenland Bunch Newsletter - Hannes Graf - the website, Spirit of Gradisce, provides articles and stories about this region prior to and through the events of the Holocaust.

Sections include:

-- Jewish Lackenbach
-- Jewish Frauenkirchen
-- Jewish Kittsee
-- Jewish History Burgenland
-- Jewish Gattendorf
-- Destroyed Jewish Communities

The setions are interesting and provide much on the Jewish history of these places through the events of the Holocaust. Those with ancestral roots in this area should find information helpful to their general knowledge.

Visit the site at the link above for more.