Summary

Speaker Bio

Co-Sponsored with the American Sephardi Federation and the New York Genealogical & Biographical Society

Sarina Roffé, author of Branching Out From Sepharad, outlines the history of Jews in Spain, the 1492 Expulsion, their history in Syria, and their immigration to the Americas. She will discuss the ancestry and significance of the Kassin rabbinic dynasty, which dates to the 12th Century, and the 50-year leadership of Chief Rabbi Jacob S. Kassin, who led the Syrian Jewish community in Brooklyn. At the same time, she solves a Converso mystery. Rabbi Kassin's ancestor arrive in Aleppo in 1540. Sarina solves the mystery of the time gap from 1492-1540.

Sarina Roffé is a professional genealogist, editor of DOROT, and founder of the Sephardic Heritage Project. She is also the author of Backyard Kitchen: Mediterranean Salads, a cooking app called Sarina’s Sephardic Cuisine, available in the Apple Store, as well as hundreds of articles. She is responsible for the translation and databasing of marriage and brit milah records on JewishGen. While on the Board of Governors of JewishGen, she acquired several databases of Sephardic records including cemetery records from Mexico, Venezuela, Cuba and Argentina. Sarina presents often at IAJGS Conferences and has completed over a dozen genealogies, through her genealogy consulting business, Sephardic Genealogical Journeys. She is Co-chair of the Brooklyn Jewish Historical Initiative, the first organization to document Brooklyn’s Jewish past.

GenealogyIndexer.org is a free website for searching 1 million+ pages of historical European directories (business, address, telephone), yizkor books, Galician secondary school reports, military documents, and more. Containing many millions of personal names – often with towns, street addresses, and occupations, and sometimes with vital dates or patronymics – most of the 2,000+ sources are not searchable elsewhere. This talk will focus on recently added sources and new search functionality. The use of directories in the Warsaw property restitution process will also be discussed briefly. Recipient of the IAJGS 2012 Award for Outstanding Contribution to Jewish Genealogy via the Internet and one of Family Tree Magazine's 101 Best Websites for 2015-2017.

Logan Kleinwaks is Coordinator of the JewishGen Danzig/Gdańsk SIG, a former Board Member of Gesher Galicia, and creator of online genealogy research tools. A hobbyist genealogist living near Washington, D.C., he has a research background in physics.

This lecture examines the Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive as a major project of public memory situated in a series of contexts: Jewish ethnographies, public memory projects at the turn of the millennium, and the different media used to document the Holocaust.

Jeffrey Shandler is Professor of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University. He received a PhD in Yiddish Studies from Columbia University and has held post-doctoral fellowships at the University of Pennsylvania and New York University. Shandler has also been a visiting scholar at the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Center, Tel Aviv University; the Center for Religion and Media, New York University; the Jewish Studies Program, University of California Berkeley; the Shoah Foundation, University of Southern California; the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation, Monash University; and a Starr Fellow at the Center for Jewish Studies, Harvard University.

Shandler is the author of While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 1999); Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture (University of California Press, 2005), a study of contemporary Yiddish culture; Jews, God, and Videotape: Religion and Media in America (New York University Press, 2009), which analyzes the impact of new communications technologies and media practices on American Jews’ religious life, from early recordings of cantorial music to hasidic outreach on the Internet; and Shtetl: A Vernacular Intellectual History (Rutgers University Press, 2014), an examination of how Jewish life in East European provincial towns has become the subject of extensive creativity, memory, and scholarship, from the early modern era to the present. His most recent book, *Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age: Survivors’ Stories and New Media Practices (Stanford University Press, 2017), explores the largest online archive of videotaped interviews with Holocaust survivors. Among other books, Shandler is the editor of Awakening Lives: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland before the Holocaust (Yale University Press, 2002) and co-editor of Entertaining America: Jews, Movies, and Broadcasting (Princeton University Press, 2003) and Anne Frank Unbound: Media, Imagination, Memory (Indiana University Press, 2012). His work has been translated into French, German, Japanese, and Polish.

* Shandler’s translations of Yiddish literature include Mani-Leyb’s children’s classic Yingl Tsingl Khvat (Moyer Bell, 1986) and Emil and Karl, a Holocaust novel for young readers by Yankev Glatshteyn (Roaring Brook, 2006). He has curated exhibitions for The Jewish Museum of New York, the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Shandler has served as president of the Association for Jewish Studies and is a fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research.

From 1892 to 1954, more than 12.5 million immigrants were processed through Ellis Island. Coming from all corners of the world, these souls—whom nearly 40% of Americans can call "family"—left behind possessions and family to reinvent themselves in America. Most were processed through Ellis Island without incident. But some immigrants found themselves detained due to mental or physical illness, because their paperwork was not in order, or because those who were due to receive them did not show. What kind of stories could they tell? This talk will explore the personal, sometimes heartbreaking, stories of those who came through the facility, those whose visit to the US ended there, and those whose stay on the island was unexpectedly lengthy. It will also explain how to decipher the markings on ship manifests.

Fred Voss is a genealogist and a volunteer tour guide at Ellis Island National Park. His areas of interest are Germany, Switzerland, and New Hampshire, with special interest in DNA, Immigration, and Naturalization. He is a Trustee and Education Chair for the Genealogical Society of Bergen County. He graduated from Boston College with a BA in Mathematics and more recently has successfully completed the Boston University OnLine Genealogical Research course. He has spent his career working for and with software startup companies such as Netscape Communications, Sun Microsystems, and Oracle. Since 1990, he has specialized in Internet Identity and Security.

Description

Speaker Bio

In this presentation, Samuel Norich, president of the Forward Association, the not-for-profit publisher of the Forward and the Forverts, will provide an overview of the role the Yiddish Forward has played for American Jews for the past 120 years. He will examine the features and innovations that made it the most widely read Jewish publication in the world for the first six decades of the 20th century, and now make it a resource for historians and others delving into the Jewish communities of America and Europe of those times.

Samuel Norich has distinguished himself as an analyst of American Jewry's communal structures. He is the author of "What Will Bind Us Now? A report on the institutional ties between Israel and American Jewry." He is the youngest person ever to have been elected a vice president of the World Jewish Congress, a position he held from 1975 to 1981. From 1980 to 1992, he was executive director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, the world's pre-eminent institution devoted to the documentation and study of the modern history and culture of East European and American Jewry. During his two-decade tenure as chief executive of the Forward Association, its publications broadened their reach, raised their already acclaimed journalistic quality, and took the lead among American Jewish publications in meeting the challenges and capitalizing on the opportunities of digital media. Born in a Displaced Persons camp in Germany in 1947, the son of Polish Jews, Mr. Norich emigrated to the U.S. with his family in 1957, and was educated at Columbia, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and at the University of Wisconsin. He and his wife Deborah Ugoretz have two daughters and live in Brooklyn.

Co-Sponsored by JewishGen.org at the Museum of Jewish Heritage / Lucille Gudis Memorial Lecture

When several communities in Eastern Europe have similar names and their names have been changed over the years, it may be difficult to unambiguously identify one's family’s shtetl of origin. Considering the investment in time and energy in researching one's family shtetl, it is imperative that one get it right. Yet we do not often apply rigor in identifying our family’s communities of origin. The genealogical proof standard requires rigor in our research methodology. With its application and a well-designed research plan, we assure that our findings are robust and our conclusions not easily challenged. Applied methodology with suggested genealogical sources and techniques will be explored. Resources will include landsmanshaft burial data, online archival material, and the Shoah Names database. The goal is to provide tools and methods for confirming the location of one’s family shtetl in Eastern Europe.

Emily Garber, an archaeologist by training, recently retired after a 30+ year career in natural resources management. She has been researching her family heritage since 2007 and in 2013 traveled to Ukraine to visit archives and family villages. She holds a certificate from Boston University's Genealogical Research program.

In this lecture, Jeffrey S. Gurock, Libby M. Klaperman Professor of Jewish History at Yeshiva University, recalls Jewish Harlem, a neighborhood that was once home to the second largest Jewish community in America. Using periodicals, memoirs, interviews and genealogical materials, Professor Gurock will describe the forces that brought several generations of Jews to settle there, as well as its subsequent decline in the 1920s and reemergence in the 21st-century.

A life-long New Yorker with family roots in Harlem dating back more than a century, Jeffrey S. Gurock is the author or editor of eighteen books, including the recent The Jews of Harlem: The Rise, Decline, and Revival of a Jewish Community, and over 100 scholarly articles. In 2013 his Jews of Gotham won the National Jewish Book Award from the Jewish Book Council. He also received national recognition for his work, A Modern Heretic and a Traditional Community; Mordecai M. Kaplan, Orthodoxy and American Judaism, which won the Saul Viener Prize from the American Jewish Historical Society. A leader among American Jewish historians, he served for 20 years as an editor of American Jewish History. Twice the chair of the Academic Council of the American Jewish Historical Society, he is also a Fellow of the New York Academy of History.