Whew! The week of July 15–20, 2007, in Salt Lake City went by at whirlwind speed with some 650 keen attendees having to make difficult choices among, for example, listening to an amazing array of inspiring and knowledgeable speakers, Special Interest Groups and Birds-of-a-Feather luncheons/meetings, watching terrific films, socializing or doing research at the Family History Library. “Superb,” “huge success,” “wonderful” are just a few of the words used by those who were there. What follows are some highlights of the conference hosted by the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies (IAJGS).

One of the first things greeting attendees was an exceptional exhibit called “Lives Remembered: Photographs of a Small Town in Poland 1895–1939.” Though the photographs were of Szczuczyn, Poland, they were reflective of shtetl life in much of Eastern Europe. The exhibit, assembled by Mike Marvins, consisted of numerous photographs taken by Marvin’s grandfather, Zalman Kaplan, when he was the Szczuczyn photo­grapher from 1895 to 1939.

Reading about Paul Shapiro’s activities leading to the opening of the International Tracing Service (ITS) files at Bad Arolsen¹ is exciting, but hearing him describe his years of work, in person, as the opening ceremony speaker, left me and the rest of the audience incredibly moved. What a fantastic accomplishment!

Dan Rottenberg, author of the first published guidebook on Jewish genealogy research, Finding Our Fathers, gave a first-rate speech at the banquet and graciously announced at the end that he was giving up his copyright to a significant portion of that book—the alphabetical list of family names with information on each entry. I’m sure it will be posted on the web before too long. Banquet festivities also included awarding of the 2007 IAJGS Lifetime Achievement to Mathilde Tagger of Israel for her many years of Sephardic research and the 2007 IAJGS Award for Outstanding Contribution to Jewish Genealogy via the Internet, Print or Electronic Product to Lars Menk for his remarkable book, A Dictionary of German-Jewish Surnames.

Noteworthy new resources and search techniques were announced during the week, such as:

IAJGS Immediate Past President, Hal Bookbinder, thanks AVOTAYNU publisher, Gary Mokotoff, for his participation in the Salt Lake conference. Photo courtesy of Marc Manson.

• How to find a digitized version of the Gemeindelexikon der im Reichsrate vertretenen Koenigreiche und Laender (Gazetteer of the Crown Lands and territories represented in the Imperial Council) online.² Published (in German) in Vienna in 1907, it includes a volume for each province in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
• JewishGen unveiled a new search tool for family names and ancestral towns on its homepage.³
• Filming of some Czech archival records is underway

for the first time.

• Gary Mokotoff demonstrated a little-known feature of searching both the JewishGen and Avotaynu websites using square brackets ([ ])
• In his presentation, Stanley Diamond, Executive Director of Jewish Records Indexing-Poland (JRI-Poland), discussed the outlook for resumption of indexing records in the Polish State Archives. As a result of preliminary discussions with the General Director of the Polish State Archives (PSA), Diamond expects that JRI-Poland will be invited to Warsaw for discussions about the possible resumption of some form of cooperation with the PSA. The board of JRI-Poland is cautiously optimistic.

Presentations covered a wide variety of topics including:

• Using naturalization records
• Dating old photographs by using fashion clues
• Writing your family history
• Jewish vital records in Bohemia and Moravia
• Searching the Hamburg passenger lists
• Lithuanian research
• Russian resources
• Romanian National Archives
• Genetic genealogy
• Using Family Tree Maker
• Military resources in Eretz Israel
• Canadian immigration
• Jewish ancestors in Germany in the 17th century
• Computer labs
• New system to be put in place by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to help genealogists
• Much, much more.

Of course, many participants took the opportunity to spend time in the nearby Family History Library, where millions of films and other resources are readily available.

Lest the reader think all was serious business, I hasten to add that Mike Karsen’s presentation on “Sex, Murder and Genealogy” was wonderfully amusing, Steve Morse’s dry sense of humor came through in presentations on his one-step tools, and a great deal of laughter could be heard emanating from the room where Daniel Schlyter presented Jewish Genealogy Jeopardy.

At the IAJGS annual meeting, Alexander Avraham, on behalf of Yad Vashem, presented a certificate to Donald Hirschhorn of the JGS of Palm Beach County in recognition of his activism, dedication and outstanding volunteerism as coordinator for the Shoah Victims Names Recovery Project. The IAJGS member organizations approved the granting of the 2007 Stern Award of $2,000 to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to be used for indexing materials it receives from the International Tracing Service (ITS). The following officers were re-elected: Anne Feder Lee, president; Michael Brenner, vice president; Joel Spector, secretary; and Mike Posnick, treasurer. The objectives of the IAJGS, found in Article III of the IAJGS by-laws, were amended to reflect an important focus on monitoring governmental efforts to restrict access to genealogically relevant records.⁴

Many Helped

No conference could have taken place without the tremendous effort of numerous volunteers under the direction of conference co-chairs Michael Brenner and Hal Bookbinder, IAJGS vice-president and immediate past president respectively. Mazel tov to everyone! We are grateful to the JGS of Utah for providing valuable assistance and volunteers. Many thanks to The Generations Network for sponsoring the Ancestry.com Resource Room; to the Family History Library for providing extended hours for attendees, speakers and special maps for the resource room; and to Genzyme for a substantial educational grant and for sending Gary Frohlich to share important information on Ashkenazic genetic diseases, particularly Gaucher disease. We greatly appreciate the generous contributions by Harvey Krueger, Alan Rinsler, Rochelle Kaplan, E. Randol and Pamela Schoenberg. Many helped by placing ads in the banquet journal: Center for Jewish History, Czech Torah project, Jossey-Bass publishers, Jacob Rader Marcus Center, Congregation Kol Ami of Salt Lake City, JGSs, SIGs and individuals. We also benefited from participation by many vendors.

Networking, hugging old friends, making new friends, meeting a new relative, learning new ways to enhance your genealogy research, gaining knowledge from experts who graciously share their time and knowledge—that is what the annual conference is always about, and that is what happened in Salt Lake City.

Syllabus Available

To order a syllabus, e-mail Mike Posnick at <mpoz@ earthlink.net> or write to him at 2601 Princeton Ave. South, Minneapolis, MN 55416. The cost is $35 plus shipping and handling. To order the CDs with the presentations, go to . Click on “Search.” Go to “Search by Sponsor.” Select Jewish Genealogical Society. Then, select 27th IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy.

Notes

1. See, for example, Sallyann Amdur Sack, “Interview with Paul Shapiro, the Man Who Opened the ITS,” AVOTAYNU, Vol. XXIII, No. 2 (Summer 2007), 13–15.
2. <http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/cdm4/search.php> Search for the word “Gemeindelexikon.”
3. <www.jewishgen.org>
4. <www.iajgs.org>

Anne Feder Lee, PhD, president of the IAJGS, lives in Honolulu and is a freelance author on political and legal issues. Her genealogy research focuses on ancestors from Berlin, Bratislava, Brody, Prague and Vienna, as well as small towns in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Mecklenburg (northern Germany).