The Pesach holiday has many names – Pesach, the Festival of Matza, the Springtime Festival and The Festival of our Freedom. More than six months have gone by and Israel still has so many people waiting for their freedom. The hostages are in our thoughts and prayers every day. In certain ways there are parallels between Pharoah and the leaders of Hamas in their unwillingness to listen to the pleas of the people and let our people go. Just as the Israelites finally found the way out of Egypt and slavery, we hope that a solution will allow the hostages to return home to their loved ones. The artw ..read more

by Tal Reiss Introduction The various official documents you will find in your family research will help you trace and learn about your ancestors. Birth, marriage and death records (B.M.D.), immigration records, etc., will detail the basic “facts of life” required to be documented by the central governments. Personal documents, including diaries, personal letters and autobiographical books, will help put together the “puzzle” in describing the personal style and nature of life of family members. Common to all documents and materials are the text content, from which you will usually receive dir ..read more

By Aviad Ben Izhak – Translated from Hebrew by Ellen Stepak   On the first of September 1939, the very day on which World War II broke out, the refugees’ boat known as Tiger Hill approached the beach of Tel Aviv. Among the hundreds of refugees on the ship, was a close-knit group, a group which had boarded the boat at its embarkment port of Varna, Bulgaria. The group numbered about 45 men and women, emigres from Bulgaria, in their twenties. Who were they and how are they connected to the subject of this article? *** The Hashomer Hatsair movement in Bulgaria was established in 1923, with 3 ..read more

by Katherine Fennelly  I grew up in a completely secular household in the United States. My parents neither held religious beliefs nor attended services of any kind.  My father proclaimed himself an agnostic and my mother an atheist. Imagine my surprise when a subscription to 23andMe revealed that—on my mother’s side of the family—I am 98.4% Ashkenazi. Unfortunately, my mother passed away before I read this report.  However, years earlier I had asked her about an offhand comment from one of my cousins on the West Coast that our family was Jewish. She was visibly perturbed and sa ..read more

Ellen Stepak   Hashomer Hatsair (in translation “The Young Guard”) was established in 1913. This year the organization is celebrating 110 years since its founding. From its roots in Galicia in Eastern Europe, Hashomer Hatsair developed, and branches were opened in Jewish communities throughout the world. We at IGRA are happy to share our best wishes with Hashomer Hatsair on this occasion. Various documents from the Shomer Hatsair archives can be found in the IGRA All Israel Database (AID). Following are two samples of available records from the AID:   HaKibbutz HaArzi Census 1940 fro ..read more

By Ellen Stepak My expertise in this subject began with a very large research project known as MVC. Twenty years ago, in 2003, along with Matilda Tagger of blessed memory, Chana Furman and Rosie Feldman, I undertook a very large project of documenting as many as possible of the memorials in Israel to Jewish communities which were destroyed in the Shoah. At the time, we were all members of the Israel Genealogical Society, and the project remains in its website. We called it Memorials to Vanished Communities (MVC). This project may not be familiar to many of you, so I am taking this opportunity ..read more

Sephardi Voices is an audio-visual history project to document and preserve the testimonies of Sephardi/Mizrahi Jews from Islamic lands now living in a transnational Diaspora and Israel. The presentation illustrates the potential of the archive for scholarly and public research and to foster educational outcomes. The presentation has 3 parts: the narrative of Sephardi Voices and its mission the data collection and its accessibility illustrations of the collection through a few audio-visual narratives from the Sephardi Voices Archives collection The final illustration will highlight the Iraqi ..read more

Name changes, both in adopted countries and in the old world, make determining Ashkenazic (central and eastern European) Jewish names a genealogical puzzle. One cannot take research back to the old country until one has identified forenames and last names. This presentation will introduce some of the basic clues for recognizing the same person recorded under a variety of names. An archaeologist by training (B.A., and M.A.), Emily Garber has been researching her Jewish family heritage since 2007 and holds a certificate from Boston University’s Genealogical Research program. She is a family hist ..read more

In this webinar Gregory Kontos discusses archival resources available to those researching Jewish ancestry in Greece. With a special focus on the historic Jewish community of Salonika (Thessaloniki) and examples from real case studies, a wide variety of sources, from civil vital records to documents preserved by Holocaust survivors, will be described and analyzed. Gregory Kontos was born in 1996. He holds degrees in history from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and the University of Leiden. He currently is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Athens ..read more

Welcome! Before I begin – I would like to take a moment to reflect and remember four extraordinary figures, part of IGRA’s tapestry, who passed away since we last met. Hank Skirball – an avid genealogist (responsible for my taking the dive into genealogy in the 1990’s), researched, scoured archives in the United States, Germany and Lithuania, and built a tree with 14,700 people! He was active in the Jerusalem English lectures of the IGS and – a founder, supporter, member of the Va’adat Bikoret and editor of many articles – of IGRA for many, many years. Barbara Ellman lived in New Jersey but vo ..read more