New Mexico: It's snowing!

Today has been very different.

After a long time in the Middle East, Tracing the Tribe is watching snow come down!

This morning began with cold rain and, within just the past 10 minutes, it has begun snowing ... and sticking!

The weather reports predicted this, and since I barely remember how to drive in the snow - it's been a very long time - yesterday we made a supermarket run in case we had to stay home for a day or so.

Now I have no excuse but to catch up on a mountain of email and blogging.

I don't think our snowfall will rival my good friend Thomas MacEntee's Chicago blizzard but - for me - this seems quite enough!

Mother Nature also seems to be preparing me for my February appearances at the RootsTech conference in Salt Lake City!

WDYTYA USA: Season 2 celebrities announced

NBC today announced the celebrities who will participate in season two of the US-version "Who Do You Think You Are?"

The new season of the show, produced by Lisa Kudrow, begins February 4, 2011. The roster includes:

• Gwyneth Paltrow
• Tim McGraw
• Rosie O’Donnell
• Steve Buscemi
• Kim Cattrall
• Lionel Richie
• Vanessa Williams
• Ashley Judd

From the trenches of the Civil War to the shores of the Caribbean, and from the valleys of Virginia to the island nations of Australia and Ireland, “Who Do You Think You Are?” will reveal the fabric of humanity through everyone’s place in history. Each week a different celebrity takes a journey into their family’s past, traveling all over the world. 

While giving viewers an in-depth look into their favorite stars’ family tree, each episode will expose surprising facts and life changing encounters that will unlock people’s emotions, show just how connected everyone is not only to the past, but to one another.

For more information, visit the NBC official show site.    

2011 Top 40 Blogs: Tracing the Tribe nominated

Tracing the Tribe is deeply honored to be nominated - in the Heritage category - for the 2011 edition of the Top 40 Best Genealogy Blogs, sponsored by Family Tree Magazine.

This year, the magazine enlisted top bloggers to help formulate the categories, qualifications, with nominations provided by readers. The results of the voting - the Family Tree 40 - will be announced in the July 2011 issue of the magazine.

The Family Tree 40 panelists included experts Lisa Louise Cooke (Genealogy Gems),  Randy Seaver (Genea-Musings), Myrt (DearMyrtle blog) and Thomas MacEntee (Geneabloggers).

The list includes excellent blogs in eight categories:

• Local/regional history and genealogy: Blogs focused on research in a specific county, state or region. Most library and archive blogs, as well as many local historical and genealogical society blogs, are here.

• Heritage groups: Blogs focusing on the family history of a specific ethnic, religious or national background (such as African-American, Jewish, Polish, etc.) [Tracing the Tribe is in this category]

• Research advice and how-to: Blogs that primarily explain how to research, analyze photos or perform various family history tasks. These offer tips, strategies and examples; explain genealogical concepts; and write about how to use new resources.

• Cemeteries: These feature content primarily about cemetery research and visiting cemeteries. Many feature tombstone photos and transcriptions, with information about those interred.

• “My Family History”: Blogs about the blogger’s own roots, including accounts of personal research, personal family photos and heirlooms, stories, recipes, etc.

• “Everything” blogs: Blogs that cover it all - genealogy news, research advice, opinions, local history, family stories, etc.

• New blogs: Blogs launched during the past year.

• Technology: Blogs focused on genealogy websites, software, DNA testing or other aspects of technology as it relates to genealogy.

Click here to vote in the Family Tree 40.

Vote for five blogs in each of the eight categories, through 11.59am, Monday, December 20. Voters may vote as often as they wish.

Tracing the Tribe is delighted to have been nominated.

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.     

Boston: Finding lost families, Dec. 12

Tracing the Tribe has - over the years - discovered Talalay relatives in St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Mogilev, Moscow, as well as those in the US, Germany and Israel.

It is always an interesting experience to reconnect with "lost" relatives, who each provide details previously unknown.

Finding and reconnecting lost relatives in the FSU and Russian Empire is the focus of the next meeting of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Greater Boston, on Sunday, December 12.

The program, featuring a panel of experts, begins at 1.30pm at Temple Emanuel, Newton Centre. There is no admission fee.

US descendants of immigrants from the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union report on finding relatives from the Former Soviet Union (FSU) and a recent Soviet émigré reports on finding descendants of his family who came to the US in the earlier waves of immigration.

Speakers include:

-- Aaron Ginsburg: A first-generation American; founder and president of The Friends of Jewish Dokshitsy. He spearheaded an international effort to help the local government of Dokshitsy, Belarus restore and re-dedicate the town’s Jewish cemetery. He recently organized a Dokshitsy reunion in Rhode Island (documented at Tracing the Tribe). He has been involved with cemetery restoration, shtetl and family history since 1995.

-- Yefim Kogan: Born in Kishinev, Moldova; emigrated from Moscow in 1989. Since then, his extensive genealogical research has enabled him to trace part of his family to the mid-18th century and to find relatives in the US who left Russia in 1906. Currently a graduate student at Hebrew College with a focus in Eastern European Jewish cultural history, he has presented on Jewish history in Bessarabia and genealogy at IAJGS conferences. He is a volunteer JewishGen coordinator.

-- Carol Clingan: A third-generation American, her grandparents came from Belarus and Ukraine. Over nearly 20 years of research, she has traced family back to the early-19th century and discovered relatives still living in the FSU. She is JGSGB vice-president and Program Committee co-chair.

For directions, click here.

Boston-area readers should mark this upcoming date:
-- January 16: Robert Weinberg, "DNA of the Jewish People, Similarities and Differences."

For more information on JGSGB programs, click here.

New York: HIAS photo archives, Dec. 19

A picture is worth a thousand words.

What is more precious to a family historian than the treasured photos of our families through the generations?

Valery Bazarov of HIAS will present “HIAS Photo Archives: Faces of Immigration,” at the JGS of New York's annual members-only brunch on December 19.

The event will begin with brunch at 11am, followed by the program at 12.40pm, at the Brotherhood Synagogue 28 Gramercy Park South (near 3rd Avenue), in Manhattan. Admission: JGSNY members, free; others, $5 at the door for the presentation at 12.30pm only.

In every family, such photos are treasured and relished – even more so in the family of HIAS that amounts to more than 4 million Jews who immigrated to America. Forty linear feet of the archival collection contain 22,000 images taken at the most crucial times, when ties with the past were severed and a new life was still unknown. These pictures chronicle a period that lasted more than 100 years.

Refugees from persecution, pogroms, and poverty, escapees from death and famine – they all pass before our eyes when telling the story of their suffering and hope. The first Seders on Ellis Island and Jewish children in Yokohama, the internment camps in Vichy France and displaced persons on board the military transports that brought them to safe havens, Hungarian and Cuban refugees, North African Jews and the Soviet Jewry exodus – these images will leave no hearts unmoved.

Valery will also present case studies of rescued and resettled families at different periods of immigration history.

He is the director of the HIAS Family History and Location Services, which helps immigrants of different generations find family members and friends – often in other countries – with whom they have lost contact over the years, sometimes decades. He is committed to finding and honoring the heroes, Jewish and non-Jewish, who rescued European Jews during the Holocaust.

Tracing the Tribe's good friend Valery researches HIAS history and reports on his findings as frequent lecturer at international and national Jewish genealogy conferences and societies.

For more information, click here.

New York: National Yiddish Theatre, Dec. 12

Attendees of the 2006 New York international Jewish genealogy conference will remember the hit evening performance by Zalmen Mlotek.
Motek, director of the National Yiddish Theatre-Folksbiene, will present "100 Years of Yiddish Musical Theatre" with guest Daniella Rabbani and the New Yiddish Chorale at the Kingsborough Performing Arts Center on Sunday, December 12, at 3pm. Tickets are $25.

An internationally recognized authority on Yiddish folk and theater music, he is the artistic director of the nation’s only Yiddish Theatre,, travels the world giving concerts, lectures and other programs.

"100 Years of Yiddish Musical Theatre" was hailed as the “runaway hit” of the Berkeley Jewish Music Festival and was highly praised by Yiddishkayt L.A., while Ms. Rabbani’s performance was deemed “utterly alive” by the New York Observer.

This elegant piece celebrates the Jewish musical accent in American theatre, beginning with the origins of the Yiddish theatre in the wine cellars of Rumania and treating us to operetta arias, humorous vaudeville ballads, backstage renditions of Fiddler on the Roof, and more. Simultaneous English translations are projected on a large screen.

For tickets, click here, or call 718-368-5596.

New Mexico: Learning the ropes

Our family has made several major moves over our history.

I'm not only talking about the move from 14th-century Spain which brought the TALALAY to Mogilev, Belarus. Or the move that took my direct branch from Belarus to the US. Major moves have also included Teheran, Miami, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Tel Aviv - and this most recent one to New Mexico.

In each new place, I felt it was important to immediately get involved, to begin to find a place in the life of the community, to find an outlet for personal interests. Of course, for more than 20 years, genealogy has been a major interest.

Today, I met with New Mexico Jewish Federation executive director Sam Sokolove, New Mexico Jewish Historical Society president Dorothy Amsden, Rabbi Min Kantrowitz. The meetings were good, providing excellent possibilities for future involvement.

And it was a reunion of sorts with Dorothy, whom I first met years ago at the last international Jewish genealogy conference hosted by the JGS of Greater Washington, in DC.

On another note, I was happy to converse - in Farsi - with the head of an Iranian Bahai family who settled here about a decade ago.

Some readers have asked privately about the recent lack of graphics in Tracing the Tribe posts. While my graphics files survived the smashing of my poor PC - and most were on flashdrives in any case - it takes take time to add those, and I'm trying to get back to speed providing information first and foremost.

The graphics will soon begin to appear once again for readers' visual enjoyment.

I truly appreciate the kind wishes - public and private - of readers and friends concerning our move to the Land of Enchantment, and wish everyone an illuminating Festival of Lights.

Enjoy your latkes (with applesauce, sour cream or "naked," straight from the frying pan), sugfaniot (have a chocoate-filled one for me!), or whatever your culinary traditions prescribe for this holiday.

Tell your family stories once again as your family lights the hanukiah, and remember the generations of your families as they did the same thing for centuries in all parts of the world.

With best wishes and appreciation for your continued support,
Schelly