Faith, Family & Freedom in Colonial Jewish Newport, Rhode Island
    

Keith Stokes, Sunday, September 23

Finding Your Jewish Family Roots
    

Fay Bussgang and Carol Clingan, Sunday, October 7

Society members, Fay Bussgang, former co-president, and Carol Clingan, vice president, will speak on An Introduction to Jewish Genealogy.  The speakers will describe the many records available locally and in Eastern Europe and how to access them, as well as the myriad of materials now available on the Internet.  They will show what gems of information they have discovered from these sources.  

The Austro-Hungarian Empire; Conventional and Non-Conventional Resources
    

Henry Wellisch, Sunday, October 14

Contemporary Sephardic Communities in America - History and Overview
    

Moshe Tessone, Sunday, Nov. 11

Judith Romney Wegner has researched her family in Australia. Her great-grandparents sailed to New Zealand as British colonists in the mid-19th century where her grandfather was born in 1867. He later returned to England. However, other members of his family moved to Australia. Judith will share the process of her research and her findings. She has used information on tombstones, newspapers, Australian Jewish Historical Society Journal articles, Australian and New Zealand Birth, Marriage, and Death records, military service records, and in one case the entire proceedings of a coroner’s inquest to discover information about her relatives.

Professor Judith Romney Wegner holds law degrees from Cambridge and Harvard Universities and a PhD in Judaic Studies from Brown. She is a life-time member of the English Bar and a retired member of the Rhode Island and American Bar Associations. Dr. Wegner has pursued two careers, first as a lawyer and later as a professor of Judaic Studies and comparative religious studies at several New England colleges. Now retired, she continues to pursue research into various aspects of Judaism and Islam. Her other passion is researching the genealogy of her ancestors, especially the Anglo-Jewish branch, who came to England from Holland before 1800.
 

Award-winning author Daniel Mendelsohn will describe his search to discover the fates of family members who perished in the Holocaust at the inaugural Jewish Genealogy Lecture, Finding the Lost.

Mendelsohn, a professor of Humanities at Bard College and frequent contributor to the New York Times Magazine and Book Review, is author of The Lost: a Search for Six of Six Million (HarperCollins, 2006). The poignant history and memoir chronicles his global quest to uncover what happened to the family of his great-uncle Shmiel Jäger, who sent letters to American relatives pleading for help as the Nazis tightened their grip on Jews in his Polish town.  The Lost became a bestseller and received the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, the National Jewish Book Award, the Salon Book Award and the American Library Association Medal for Outstanding Contribution to Jewish Literature.

The new annual lecture is part of a collaboration between Hebrew College and the Jewish Genealogical Society of Greater Boston (JGSGB) that also will include a course in Jewish Genealogical Research beginning February 25, 2008 (see below).  The lecture and course are made possible by a generous grant from Harvey Krueger of New York. 

The lecture is free and open to the public.  Due to the popularity of this event, registration has been closed.

 

Learn how to take your genealogy research to a new level by making your Google searches more successful. Google is a simple and helpful way to search the internet, but are you getting just what you want or need? When you get a promising looking return, do you know how to get the most out of it? Did you know there are many more very useful things Google can do beyond that simple search screen?  These and many more questions will be answered at the program.

Marx of Lexington has been researching his German roots since 2001 and can now trace his ancestors back to the mid- 1600s. Much of his success has come from searching the World Wide Web, and his primary tool has been Google. He is the treasurer of the JGSGB.

This course will last eight sessions and will be held at Hebrew College starting on February 25th, 2008. The faculty will be course coordinators, Heidi Urich and Tom Weiss, as well as other experienced researchers from the JGSGB. The course is geared toward both beginners and more advanced students. Students will gain a strong foundation in Jewish genealogy to enable them to research family origins. The course will include introductions to relevant world history, geography, methodology and knowledge of resources. Students must have basic computer skills.
Please register for this course.