South Africa: 2009 Jewish Migration conference

Jewish genealogy is a main category in the call for papers for the 2009 "Jewish Migration and the Family" conference.

Conference dates are January 5-7, 2009, at the Kaplan Centre, University of Cape Town, South Africa.

The concept of the family is perhaps one of the most mythologised and stereotyped in Jewish history and culture. This conference will explore, within a multi- and inter-disciplinary framework, how Jewish families have been constructed, reconfigured and reconstructed from ancient to modern times.

Papers are especially welcome from those exploring ... the reasons behind the phenomenal growth of Jewish genealogy; and developing from the 2007 Kaplan Centre/Parkes Institute conference on ‘Jewish Journeys’, the role of and changing ideas about the family in Jewish migration patterns across the ages.

Program proposals (250 words) are due May 1, 2008 to to Dr James Jordan, jaj1@soton.ac.uk. Acceptance notices will be made by June 30, 2008.

For more information, click here.

Florida: Talking about Jewish DNA

I thought I had all my Google alerts set to immediately inform me of any and all Jewish genealogy stories. Tom Kemp of GenealogyBank must have a better arrangement, as he just let me know personally about this story in today's South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Thanks, Tom!

It is a good story about aspects of Jewish DNA in a large daily paper.

There were things you just didn't talk about in Harvey Brown's family, and the past was one of them.

His immigrant father spoke many languages — Russian, French, German, Polish and English — but he never said which was his mother's tongue. Brown wasn't even sure of his own last name, which he suspected had been changed when his family arrived in the United States.

Today, Brown has answers, thanks in part to a simple DNA test. In South Florida, many Jewish Americans like him are using such tests to restore family knowledge blurred by time or destroyed by the Holocaust.

"I never knew anything about my history. My family was very quiet about it. Not a word. It was too painful," said Brown, 71, a Wellington resident who lost more than 80 relatives to the Holocaust. "I had to find out."

Brown's DNA test revealed potential relatives in other states.

The story goes on to discuss how the tests can disclose ancient origins or to see if contemporary families have a common ancestor.

Members of Jewish genealogical groups in Broward and Palm Beach counties are quoted in the story as they turn to forensic DNA technology to bridge the gap of missing documents and brick walls, to verify or disprove family ties or to confirm oral history.

Family Tree DNA's Bennett Greenspan is mentioned throughout the article. Some 2,000 customers of the company live in Florida and about 30% are Jewish.

It describes the test, covers Y-DNA (male) and mitDNA (female), and much more.

One testee used the Y-DNA test to confirm that a family branch lives in Argentina, and he and his wife have already visited their new cousin in Buenos Aires.

The article also made the point about how the future of genetic genealogy will enable people to look at their family histories, and understand genetic dispositions for certain diseases.

There are a few comments by readers posted to the story, but they aren't very pleasant.

UPDATE: A reader mentioned she couldn't find the comments, so I went back and checked. It seems the paper has removed the 13 comments that appeared on Sunday, most probably because of their offensive nature.

Read more here.

New York: Cartoonist case study, Feb. 17

Political cartoonist, illuminist and illustrator Arthur Szyk (1894-1951) is the focus of a case study documenting his life with genealogical documents, at the next meeting of the New York Jewish Genealogical Society at 2pm, Sunday, February 17, at the Center for Jewish History.

Presenting "Arthur Szyk: An Artist’s Self-Portrait in Documents" is Rhoda Miller, Jewish Genealogical Society of Long Island president.

Szyk is not­ed for extraordinarily detailed art involving Jewish themes, anti-Nazi cartoons, adver­tising, and illustrations in which he typically includes self-portraiture as well as char­ac­ter­izations of his family.

While Szyk an ubiquitous artist during the WW II era, this is the first time his life has been examined in the context of his involvement with bureaucratic systems during his most prolific periods.

The detail of his self-portrait through documents is revealed through genealogical research strategies that intertwine rabbinic research, Polish records, the Holocaust, American immigration and natural­ization, as well as FBI in­vestigation. His Jewish, anti-Nazi and Zionist themes are explored as an expression of his personal and artistic life.

Rhoda Miller holds an Ed.D and is a Certified Genealogist (CG). She lectures widely at libraries, community groups, genealogy societies and annual Jewish genealogical conferences. She teaches a family history credit course at Dowling College (Oakdale, NY).

The CJH's Ackman & Ziff Family Genealogy Institute will be open 12:30-1:45pm for net­work­ing and access to research materials and computers.

For more information, click here.

Genealogy on Parade

Thanks to Bill West at West in New England for an interesting and creative experience.

He challenged the gen-blogging community to participate in his parade and build floats. I think we all rose to the occasion and memorialized our families and places.

Check out Bill's blog for the complete float guide.

I was honored to receive the coveted Golden Flutaphone Award for the Best Use of Decorative Flutaphones. Thank you, Bill.

What's a flutaphone, you ask. A little judicious web searching will turn up videos, children's books and more. Enjoy!

Digitized Frankfurt 'Memorbuch'

An important source of German Jewry genealogical data, the Frankfurt Memorbuch, has been made available online by the Shapell Family Digitization Project of the National Library of Israel.

The 1,073-page vellum manuscript documents the deaths of important community members of Frankfurt am Main, over some 300 years (1628-1907). They are mainly in the form of Yizkor prayers followed by biographical data.

There is an introduction (English and Hebrew) on the Memorbuch by the late scholar Cecil Roth, as well as indexes (only in Hebrew) for pages and dates.

The Memorbuch opens with a poem written in 1712 telling of a 1711 fire in the Frankfurt synagogue which destroyed the old Memorbuch. The poem goes on to relate how, at the initiative of Eliezer Leizer Oppenheim a new Memorbuch was prepared, and that the entries for 1628 to 1711 were copied into it from the communal burial records (leaves 5a-57a). The new entries begin on leaf 57a with the death of Frumet, the wife of Eliezer Leizer Oppenheim.

The entries brought over from the burial records are very brief. Those written for the Memorbuch record primarily important members of the community (entry in the Memorbuch required payment). Deaths of infants, strangers and the poor were generally not recorded.

Click here for the complete English introduction and the Hebrew indexes.

The Jewish National University Library also offers a very good selection of web links here for additional sources of information in many categories.

Sephardim in Vienna - Records and Graves - UPDATE

The Birth Register of the Vienna Turkish (Sephardic) Community has been completely indexed and is now online, thanks to Mathilde Tagger in Jerusalem. Many of these surnames originate in the Ottoman Empire, such as Turkey, Bulgaria and Serbia.

Some were Ashkenazi, adds Tagger.

Data includes register page and row number, birth date, baby's surname/given names, sex, single birth/twin, both parents' surnames/given names, mother's birth dates/place, midwife's/mohel's full names. Some 1,440 births and some 4,650 individuals are named in these records.

The marriage register will be online soon, according to Tagger, with information on bride, groom, fathers and grandfathers. There are some 10,000 individuals in both the birth and marriage registers.

The searchable database is here. For more SephardicGen.com databases, click here.

In the SephardicGen introduction to this new database:

According to article #1 of the Passarowitz Peace Treaty signed between Charles VI, the Austrian Emperor and the Ottoman Sultan Ahmed Khan in 1718, free sojourn was granted to the respective subjects of the two countries. This is how Turkish Jews began to enjoy unrestricted movement in Austria. This regulation was again confirmed in the Peace Treaty of Belgrade in 1739.

Moses Lopez Pereira, also know as Baron Diego Pereira D'Aguilar, (Portugal 1699 - London, August 10 1759), held the tobacco monopoly in Austria from 1725 till 1747. Baron of the Holy Roman Empire, d’Aguilar enjoyed the greatest freedom of belief, and was the founder of the Spanish or Turko-Jewish community in Vienna. He succeeded in obtaining many concessions for the relief of his oppressed fellow worshippers.

The community was called “Turkish” because most of its members were indeed from Turkey. Its origins have to be placed in the years 1740-1750, when the Sephardim asked for a synagogue. The earliest Sephardic Jews living in Vienna had the following surnames: Camondo, Nissim, Eskenasy, Amar, De Mayo, Benveniste etc.

Austrian authorities published a document fixing the community's statutes in June 1778; known as Punkten (German) or Los Puntos (Ladino). Austria required the Turkish Jews to register birth, marriages and death. In 1909, the Turkish Community officially became a part of Vienna's Jewish community.

During Kristallnacht (The Night of Broken Glass, November 9-10, 1938) the Turkish synagogue building and books were destroyed. Most of Austria's Jews perished in concentration camps.

The Family History Library (FHL) has recently added microfilms to their Jewish records in Vienna collection. One is titled "Turkische Israelitengemeinde – The Turkish Jewish Community."

For pictures of Sephardic gravestones, go to London researcher Celia Male's site, which holds 51 images, including maps, of Sephardic Graves - Vienna, Zentralfriedhof, which she photographed and researched.

In her photographs of Wahringer Cemetery, opened when the old Jewish cemetery was closed in 1784. "All inner-city cemeteries were closed for health reasons," she writes. Wahringer was then closed in 1879, when Zentralfriedhof opened.

Male has just sent me an update on her site, writing that there are 152 pictures and she is adding births and other data to the photos, as a sort of pictorial history.

To see the genealogy information related to a deceased's family, Male gives two examples: click here and here.

Additionally, she has also discovered a few links to photographs from other individuals who have found relatives' graves in her photographs.

The following family names are represented in Wahringer Cemetery:

ABINERI, ADOUT, ADUTT, ALBACHARY, ALBALAG, ALBINERI, ALFANDARI, ALKALAY, ALKANY, ALMULY, ALTARAC, ALTARAS, AMAR, ARDITI, ASCOLI, ASRAEL, BAZAR, BENMAJOR, BENSEF, BENVENISTI, BENZION, CAMONDO, CARMONA, CHAMEIDAS, CHARMATZ, COEN, COHEN, CONFINO, DANON, DAVID, DOMAJO, ELIAS, EPHRAIM, EPHRUSSI, EPRIM, ESKENASY, FARCHY, FINZI, GENTILI, GILIBAN, GISKON, HAIM, HAIES, HALFON, HASSAN, KALDERON, KAMCHI, KAPON, LEON, LEWE, LEWY, LEVI, De MAJO, MAJOR, NADLER, NACHMIAS, NISSIM, PARDO, RAPPOPORT, ROSANIS, ROSSANI, RUSSO, SABETEY, SALOMON, SEGALLO, SEMO, Del SOTTO, VENTURA, VENEZIAN, and WIDIUM.

An Indian Jewish Wedding in New York

Jewish communities in exotic corners of the globe have always fascinated me.

I hadn't spent much time investigating the Jews of India until I discovered the descendants of a Dardashti branch that had settled in Bombay. My husband's grandfather's brother (known variously as Moshe-Moshi-Agha Mehdi ben Israel Dardashti) long ago left Teheran, Iran, and fell off the family tree.

Reconnecting - by pure luck - with his descendants in Israel a few years ago, I learned that one of Moshe's wives - Miriam Mijboura - and many children moved from Baghdad to Bombay in the 19th century. Their descendants migrated again - in the 1960s - for the UK, the US and Israel, where I found them.

Since then, I've become interested in Indian Jewish culture and history. Nissim Moses continues to compile a major genealogy project for one of the three Indian Jewish communities - the Bene Israel - with some 10,000 names in his database.

The Indian Jewish Congregation in the US is planning an Indian Jewish Wedding at New York City's Westside Jewish Community Center (Amsterdam and W. 76th St.), at 1pm, Sunday, February 17.

Romiel Daniel will take the audience through an Indian Jewish wedding, including a special Malida ceremony (parched grain sacrifice of Temple times), which is nearly exclusive to the Bene Israel community.

The life-cycle event includes special blessings and the uniquely Indian Jewish ritual Eliyahu Hanavi ceremony performed on special occasions. Photographs of Indian synagogues and mikvehs will be displayed and there will be music and a festive kosher vegetarian Indian dinner.

Participants are invited to come in traditional Indian dress. Entrance: members (JCC/IJC), $20; others, $25.

The Indian Jewish community has been holding its own religious services, in the traditional Bombay practice, for the High Holidays since 1995, with members participating from California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Minnesota and elsewhere.

The IJC was founded in 2005 to provide help and support for Beth El Synagogue in Panvel, India. Built in 1849, it was badly damaged by monsoons in 2005, losing all its six Torah scrolls, the ark and damaging the bima. The IJC replaced two Torah scrolls with the help of others individuals and institution

The IJC meets at the Village Temple in Manhattan. It also conducts meetings in the city for educational events and to teach the culture and identity of the Jews of Indian to the second and third generation Indian Jews, who come from three communities: Cochin, Bagdadi and Bene Israel.

The Cochin Jews originated by settling in Cranganore and around Malabar, where they lived for centuries. In the 15th century CE they escaped to Cochin after having been attacked by Moors and Portuguese. At its largest, there were never more than 2,500 people. No more than 17 individuals, mostly elderly. live in Cochin.

The Baghdadis arrived in the 19th century from Baghdad, Iran and Syria as traders and refugees, landed in Surat and settled in Bombay, Calcutta and Pune. Numbering about 5,000 at one time, they spoke spoke Arabic, Persian and English. Today fewer tham 200 live there as most have emigrated to the UK, Australia, Canada and the US.

The Bene Israel predominate India's Jewish presence. Theories of their origin include arrival from ancient kingdoms of Israel after the Assyrian defeat in 722 BCE, or that they reached India's west coast after the Kingdom of Judah was destroyed and the Babylonians exiled the Jews in 586 BCE. Their oral tradition indicates that they fled from Antiochus in 175 BCE, were shipwrecked at Navgaon near Cheul on the Konkan Coast, 30 miles south of Bombay. Seven men and seven women survived, multiplied and spread to surrounding villages. Most Bene Israel names end in "kar," indicating their ancestral villages; there are 142 such names.

For more information on the Jews of India, click here.

Michigan: Writing family history, Feb. 17

What will you do with all your family research?
What do you say when relatives ask when your book is coming out?

Although genealogists are very good at conducting research and collecting facts, most of us delay publishing the results. I tend to reply that things keep changing so frequently that a book on either of my two families of interest is years off in the future.

However, I certainly admire and commend those who are serious about writing their family histories. If you're thinking about the possibilities and live in Michigan, this program may help you proceed with your project.

Professional genealogist, researcher and instructor Mike Karsen of Chicago will present "Write Your Family History Now," at 12.30pm Sunday, February 17, at the Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills.

He'll show participants how to publish findings in books varying from 30 pages to those with detailed biographies and historical context. The goal is to organize your findings and share them with your family as soon as possible.

Karsen has published four family histories and authored the Guide to Jewish Genealogy in Chicagoland. He's the president of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Illinois, a co-host of the 28th IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy, and has presented at state, national and international conferences. He's on the Newberry Library and Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies faculties and is a member of the Association of Professional Genealogists, the Genealogical Speakers Guild and the National Genealogical Society.

Members, free; others, $5. For directions and more details, click here.