Navigating Online Collections from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Speaker: Jude C Richter,  Ph.D. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Holocaust Survivors and Victims Database makes millions of records about individual survivors and victims of the Holocaust available to researchers from the comfort of their own homes. The indexed collections represent only a fraction of the information that can be found in the Museum’s collections. Using case studies from the Kiev Region in the Soviet Union and the Wołyn Voivodeship in Poland, this presentation will demonstrate how researchers can use collections that the Museum has made available online to find information about their families in interwar Europe. Bio: Jude C. Richter holds a ...

The “Unworthy” and the Deserted: New Genealogical Databases from The Jewish Board

Speaker: Gavin Beinart-Smollan This presentation introduces two unique genealogical resources for New York Jewish family history researchers: the United Hebrew Charities Recipients & Donors Database (1869-1877) documenting the organization's early work to help poor New York Jews, and the National Desertion Bureau Card Catalog Database (1911-1935) featuring 19,000+ cases of family abandonment and separation. Both databases, created for The Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services’ 150th anniversary, offer researchers unprecedented access to social welfare records that illuminate the challenges faced by Jewish immigrant families in New York and across the United States. This session will explore the broader historical context of ...

Temple Emanu-El at 180: The Exhibition

Speaker: Warren Klein Warren Klein, curator of the Herbert & Eileen Bernard Museum of Judaica at Temple Emanu-El, will guide JGSNY members through the exhibition Emanu-El at 180. As Temple Emanu-El celebrates the 180th anniversary of its founding, the Herbert & Eileen Bernard Museum traces that evolution in a new exhibition of paintings, works on paper, sculpture, and ephemera drawn from its own holdings, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The New York Historical, and private collections. Registration will be required. JGSNY members will receive an email with information on how to RSVP. Bio:  Warren Klein has been the curator of the Herbert & Eileen Bernard ...

Cemetery Research in the New York Area Using JGSNY's Burial Societies Database - And More

Speaker: Steve Stein One of the earliest projects of the Jewish Genealogical Society of New York was the documentation of the approximately 100 Jewish cemeteries in the New York metropolitan area. The society’s website, jgsny.org, provides extensive contact and location information about these cemeteries in the New York Metropolitan area, including links to their websites. The follow-up Burial Societies Project, begun in 1989 aimed to identify the names and locations of all Jewish burial society plots in the New York area. Included were plots belonging to landsmanshaftn, or hometown associations, whose membership often conveyed the right to be buried in a ...