Part of two of the pages of the register Waas discovered in the Ottoman Archives. This portion of the reggister was badly damaged and partly illegible. Co-founder Michael Waas will be speaking on March 7, 2024 at 2 pm EST as part of the JewishGen Talk’s series about a discovery he made last year working in the Ottoman Archives: a surviving register from the first formal census of Ottoman Izmir in 1830s that contained a surprise: surnames of the Jewish community! Read more about the lecture here and register for it. It is free with a suggested donation. This talk will be the first of many to c ..read more

by Michael Waas Kehila Kedosha Janina, the Romaniote Synagogue of New York City. Photo taken by author in May 2022. Jews have been living in what is now Greece for over 2,200 years, since the time of the Second Temple.  The Romaniote (Ρωμανιώτες, רומניוטים) community claims this ancient Diasporic community as their ancestors. The name “Romaniote” originates with the period of the Roman Empire when Jewish diasporic settlement expanded in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean region, particularly during the time of the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium) in what is now Greece, Turkey, the sout ..read more

Hollander-Waas Jewish Heritage Services is thrilled to share that co-founder, Michael Waas, has been appointed scholar-in-residence for the New York Genealogical & Biographical Society (NYG&B). He will be researching “the documentation of Jewish families in the NYG&B’s materials and produce the first-of-its-kind survey of NYG&B resources available for tracing Jewish heritage from colonial times to the present in New York State." Read more about the project here: https://www.newyorkfamilyhistory.org/nygb’s-new-scholar-residence ..read more

What moves us to stand up and speak out against evil? What does it take for ordinary people to stare down the weapons of tyranny and say “this is wrong”?  This is the story of the Rosenstraße protests, when, in 1943 love prevailed over evil, and the Nazi death machine was halted by the extraordinary protest of ordinary people - at least for a moment. “Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph ..read more

By Michael Waas Image of a 3D model of an Ottoman olive oil factory created by Michael Waas using digital photogrammetry. The model can be viewed here: https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/olive-oil-factory-inside-3196d0dc5fda49909c6914507118dd41 In today's world, digital technologies are advancing at an increasing rate. As computer processors and chips become more powerful and programs are developed to take advantage of their increased speed and power, the possibilities are endless. With these technologies, advances in heritage and genealogy have been made that were unimaginable even twenty years ..read more

By Caitlin Hollander Very rarely is a law enacted in anticipation of a disaster; they are almost always due to a tragedy that has already happened. Exit doors in the US legally must open outwards due to the 1903 Iroquois Theatre fire in Chicago, which claimed the lives of over 600 people- in part because they were trapped when the inward-swinging doors could not be opened due to the crush of the panicked crowd. In 1911, the 8th, 9th, and 10th floors of the Asch Building (now called the Brown Building) near Washington Park in Lower Manhattan were home to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, which m ..read more

By Michael Waas In the world of history and genealogy we are relying on bits and pieces of paper once living memory ends and the shrouded mists of time begin. British author L. P. Hartley (1953) famously wrote in the opening to his novel The Go-Between, “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” Hartley’s melancholy is a metaphor for how the past feels just beyond reach the further and further we traverse time. For me, genealogy in particular serves to give context and nuance to history, allowing me to follow characters in a story as they navigate the world around them ..read more

By Caitlin Hollander Last November, I participated in a cemetery indexing project in one of the sections of Mt. Zion Cemetery in Queens, New York that had become overgrown and neglected when the burial society that owned it had gone defunct. There, a grave caught my eye- while the motif of a young tree cut off before its prime is a common one in Jewish cemeteries, symbolizing a young life that had ended too soon, this particular grave was one of the most beautiful, intricate examples I had ever seen. Only a few graves in this massive cemetery- totaling over 210,000 burials- were in the same un ..read more