Speaker: Jae Heisler

During the height of the Jewish Lower East Side in the early 20th century, hundreds of synagogues populated the neighborhood, many of them small and meant for people from specific towns and regions. While few of them still exist today, these landsmanshaft synagogues were once an important feature in the lives of our immigrant ancestors who wanted a place to pray, celebrate marriages, take care of burials, and simply be with friends and family from the same town back in Europe. Jae will discuss the rise and fall of these little synagogues, how to find further information on specific ones, and ways to use synagogues to discover additional members of your family. To demonstrate their value, he will talk about what he found about one of his own ancestor's synagogues, Am Keoshim Anshei Bobrika, which was for Jews from Bobrka, Galicia.

Bio:

Jae Heisler, a passionate genealogist for well over a decade, is a Project Archivist at the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati, Ohio. He holds an MS in Library Science with a concentration in Archival Management from Simmons University and is a former Genealogist at Ancestry ProGenealogists.