Musings of a Jewish Genealogist A Journey to Africa and Beyond A Few Vignettes by Ann Rabinowitz   Sometimes a journey begins at the beginning and sometimes not.  The following vignettes reflect just such a crooked winding journey amongst the shards of memory of my family.   The journey takes us from a small shtetl in Lithuania to Bot Rivier, a small dorpie in South Africa’s eastern Cape Province much like the shtetls in Lithuania. Here, the family is nurtured, and moves on to America, where they again adjust and realize their destiny.  Later, it follows the sea ..read more

Yizkor Book Spotlight Gorodets, Belarus Yizkor Book by Bruce Drake   At the end of each week, we have been featuring excerpts from Yizkor books in JewishGen's archive. You can find the archive of past Yizkor book excerpts here: https://bit.ly/3aCH1ak .  If you are not familiar with the JewishGen Yizkor Book Project, please click on this link: http://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/faq.html  Passover begins at sundown Monday. There are many accounts of the holiday in Yizkor books and four of them are in the Passover Companion that JewishGen publishes each year so I won’t flood the marke ..read more

Museum of Jewish Heritage A Living Memorial to the Holocaust Book Talk "Jewish Life in Medieval Spain" Tuesday, May 28, 2024 7:00 PM Eastern Time Virtual "Jewish Life in Medieval Spain" Book Talk Join the Museum of Jewish heritage & Jonathan Ray on a virtual talk about the book "Jewish Life in Medieval Spain"   In Jewish Life in Medieval Spain, Jonathan Ray explores the Jewish experience in medieval Spain from the dawn of Sephardic society in the ninth century to the expulsion of 1492. An important contribution of the book is the integration of the rise and fall of Jewish life i ..read more

Romania Research Division Major Updates! May 2024   1. New Uploads now live on JewishGen’s Romania Database      a.  Over 16,000 new birth records: Iasi: 11,550 births from the years 1897-1902 and 1907-1909 Dorohoi: 2,494 births from the years 1879-1889 Falticeni: 1,438 births from the years 1865-1869, 1906-1908, 1910 Galati: 571 extractions from the birth index from the years 1883-1892 for surnames beginning with I, J, K, and L      b. 1,149 death records from Iasi, covering the year 1881 (more to come!)      c.  JOW ..read more

Yizkor Book Project Summary for April 2024   Shalom,  I begin this report by sending out a thank you to our volunteers, an action which seems to be long overdue. In addition to the professional translators, we have a small dedicated group of volunteer translators and editors who tirelessly continue their sacred work of translating Yizkor book texts from Hebrew and Yiddish into English, allowing us to provide global access to the hidden “treasures” to be found in them. I do not list the names of the volunteers here for fear of unintentionally forgetting someone, but I wish to reinfor ..read more

JewishGen Press May 2024 JewishGen Press is proud to announce our 186th publication, Book of Bursztyn (Burshtyn, Ukraine). This publication is the translation of Sefer Bursztyn.  Publication Details: Editor of Original Yizkor Book: S. Kanc Project Coordinator: Rivka Chaya Schiller Layout: Jonathan Wind Name Indexing: Jonathan Wind Cover Design: Irv Osterer Book Description: Bruce Drake Hard Cover, 8.5” by 11”, 256 pages with original photographs   Burshtyn, Ukraine is located at 49°16' N 24°38' E and 274 miles WSW of Kyyiv.  The Jewish community of Bursztyn can be dated to ..read more

For many years an ongoing topic of discussion is how we could broaden the reach of JewishGen, and make it more accessible to “not yet” genealogists. To this end, we have initiated a number of new programs over the past few years to meet this goal   ̶   holiday companion publications, a fellowship program to train the next generation of Jewish genealogical leaders, and a neshama study/volunteer trip to Poland for those “out of school.” The result has been tremendous, and something we are continuing to build upon.  This past fall, we were excited to launch one of our mos ..read more

Musings of a Jewish Genealogist Manchester Jewry Database City Directories 1855, 1888, 1927, and 1934 by Ann Rabinowitz June 24, 2001   One of the many enticing things about researching the city of Manchester, England, is the great diversity of people who made the decision to live there and the various types of employment that they became involved in. Mainly, this was due to the fortuitous circumstance of the town being situated at the confluence of three Rivers . . . the Medlock, Irwell and the Irk, and its connection with the Manchester Ship Canal, built in 1894, and its distinction as ..read more

Yizkor Book Spotlight Kuty, Ukraine Yizkor Book by Bruce Drake   At the end of each week, we have been featuring excerpts from Yizkor books in JewishGen's archive. You can find the archive of past Yizkor book excerpts here: https://bit.ly/3aCH1ak .   If you are not familiar with the JewishGen Yizkor Book Project, please click on this link: http://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/faq.html Jews in Kuty, Ukraine, strove to live peacefully with their Polish and Ukrainian neighbors using various methods to counter rising anti-Semitism, but it grew and gradually poisoned the long-lasting peaceful ..read more

Bessarabia SIG Research Division Progress Report March 2024   Dear friends, researchers, Here is an update to the Bessarabia SIG Research Division projects for the month of March 2024.  Also see What's New at the Bessarabia website. • Bessarabian Databases. Updates: Revision Lists records: We plan to upload to JewishGen in June of 2024. 2,538 records are completed. We are working with records from following towns: Kishinev, Bendery, Vale-lui-Vlad, Aleksandreny, and more. See the progress. We are looking for a Project Leader for the Bessarabia Revision lists. There are ab ..read more