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Index of Jewish Surnames in Beirut

Filed Under Uncategorized By Jacob Rosen-Koenigsbuch on January 19, 2024

[This index is dedicated to the memory of Ambassador Isaac Levanon (1944-2023)] As with other Jewish communities in the Levant, the size of the Beirut Jewish commnity during the 20th century can only be estimated. The Jewish population of the […]

À la rencontre de nos ancêtres Juifs Marocains et Algériens : NAJMA, la nouvelle association de généalogie dédiée aux juifs du Maroc et d’Algérie.

Filed Under Algerie الجزائر‎, Collaboration, DNA Studies, Maroc المغرب‎, Mediterranean, Uncategorized By Adam Brown on December 21, 2021

La présence de Juifs au Maroc et en Algérie est attestée dès le IIe siècle de l’ère moderne. Arrivés avec les Phéniciens, les Romains, les Arabes, ou à la suite des expulsions d’Espagne et du Portugal, ils forment un patchwork […]

JGSLA

Filed Under Uncategorized By Adam Brown on August 30, 2021

Slides from Adam Brown’s talk to the Jewish Genealogical Society of Los Angeles on August 29, 2021: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FgFQ-sk9YBQCyJ_yeXwL30JDHFiv6-xm/view?usp=sharing

IAJGS 2021

Filed Under Uncategorized By Adam Brown on August 3, 2021

The Genomic History of the BronzeAge Southern Levant, by Lily Agranat-Tamir et al. We are posting here references cited today during Adam Brown’s talk today on the Genetic Origins of the Jewish People: The Genomic History of the Bronze Age […]

Avotaynu DNA Lecture Materials

Filed Under Uncategorized By Adam Brown on December 3, 2020

Jewish Gen Lecture December 2, 2020 To view a recording of Adam Brown’s lecture to JewishGen viewers on , visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QafFMkGDgVw Skip ahead 4 minutes to catch the beginning of the talk! To examine Adam’s slides, visit here (warning: file […]

Personal Journey: In Search of the Lost Life and Art of Marie Rosenthal Hatschek

Filed Under Personal Journeys By Nicole Ballenger on November 26, 2017

About 20 years ago I was contacted by a man I didn’t know who wanted to share a family history with me, and also pay me a visit.  I was back East and he was out West, but he was […]

Personal Journey: The Early Badrians of Oberschlesein

Filed Under Personal Journeys By Paul Gardner on September 11, 2017

I have known about my family history since childhood, but only segments of it.  My parents, Lothar and Irma Gärtner (nee Badrian) migrated to Australia from Nazi Germany in 1938, the only passengers on a German cargo boat out of […]

Personal Journeys: Finding Mr. Katz

Filed Under Personal Journeys, South Africa By Eli Rabinowitz on December 27, 2016

This article is a sequel to my earlier article in Avotaynu Online, entitled “From One Photograph to Journeys of Research and Discovery,”,  in which I described how I uncovered and researched the romance of my great uncle Moshe and Paula Lichtzier, […]

Personal Journeys: Cousin Hillary Rodham Clinton

Filed Under Uncategorized, United States By Mark W. Gordon on December 25, 2016

At my home, we refer to Hillary Rodham Clinton as Cousin Hillary. More precisely, the correct term would be step-cousin. Detailed research demonstrates that Hillary’s grandmother married my father’s fifth cousin. But let’s start at the beginning. In August 1999, […]

Personal Journeys: From One Photograph to Journeys of Research and Discovery

Filed Under Personal Journeys By Eli Rabinowitz on August 31, 2016

All I ever knew was that I am named after my great-uncle Moshe. Moshe died in a motor accident, six weeks before his planned wedding. The date of his death is unknown, but it was sometime between the late 1920s […]

Spanish-Jewish `Nobility’ of Aleppo, Syria

Filed Under España, Mediterranean, Portugal, Syria سوريا, Uncategorized By Anne de Sola-Cardoza on August 31, 2016

As recently as 1992, more than 4,000 Jews were being held against their will in Syria, unable to leave and kept under watch, branded as “Mussawi,” followers of Moses. At that time, 50,000 Jews from Syria lived in Brooklyn’s Flatbush […]

Launching the Converso Genealogy Project: Tracking the Diaspora of the New Christians

Filed Under Crypto-Jews, España, Indexing Projects, Mediterranean, Portugal, Uncategorized, Western Sephardim By Genie Milgrom on August 20, 2016

I was born into a Roman Catholic family in Havana, Cuba, but from a young age, I felt Jewish and inexplicably was drawn to all things Jewish. After converting to Orthodox Judaism at age 34, I found clues along my […]

Personal Journeys: The Legacy of Lucian Skotnicki

Filed Under Holocaust, Personal Journeys, Polska By S. Nadja Zajdman on July 29, 2016

Of all the grandparents I never got a chance to know, I feel closest to my mother’s father Lucian. Perhaps it was my mother’s vivid storytelling that made him seem accessible. I’ve inherited his talents and his temperament; so I […]

Personal Journeys: Everything Happens for a Reason

Filed Under Personal Journeys By Madeleine Isenberg on April 21, 2016

1 December 2015 It happened again. I couldn’t believe it but I have two witnesses. Just as I was about to leave my weekly writing class at the library of the Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC), I stopped by the entry […]

Personal Journeys: The Flayer and Razin Families of Shklov

Filed Under Personal Journeys, United States, Беларусь By Shayna Muckerheide on January 27, 2016

Sitting on the passenger side of the coach, Reiza Flier swept her beady gray eyes over the family’s small home. At approximately 40 years old, this mother showed expressions of defiance and anticipation, even if she also felt sadness for […]

Personal Journeys: A World War I Casualty

Filed Under Uncategorized By Madeleine Isenberg on December 2, 2015

It was not a “dark and stormy night.” It was a bright and sunny mid-afternoon. 17 May 2015 was Celebrate Israel Day set up once again in Rancho Park, Los Angeles, as has been done for the past several years. […]

Autosomal and Mitochondrial DNA Together Solve A Family Riddle

Filed Under Case Studies, DNA Studies By Israel Pickholtz on November 13, 2015

In November 2014, I happened across an Ancestry.com online tree featuring Sarah Pikholz, her husband Eisig Baar and twelve children. The tree had them in Czechoslovakia but I quickly found the first three births in Yahilnytsya (Jagielnica) in east Galicia, […]

Personal Journeys: Leopold Goldstein, Rabbi or Not?

Filed Under Austria-Czech-Slovak, Personal Journeys By Madeleine Isenberg on September 10, 2015

Last July marked what is commonly recognized as the centennial of the start of the First World War. What parts, if any, did my family play during that war? From my research, the only person who seemingly played a noteworthy […]

Public Records Access: One Genealogist Can Make A Difference!

Filed Under Collaboration, Contributing Editors, Methods, United States By Jan Meisels Allen on September 5, 2015

This past Thursday, September 3, 2015, a legal petition was filed at the Supreme Court of the State of New York, County of New York. Brooke Schreier Ganz and ReclaimTheRecords.org [Petitioner] vs. New York City Department of Records and Information […]

Jewish Genealogical Resources in France

Filed Under Avotaynu Features, France By Anne Lifshitz-Krams on August 25, 2015

Jews probably followed the Roman armies into France; evidence of their residence dates back more than a millenium. Many rue de la juiverie (street of the Jewish district) or rue des Juifs testify to their former presence as does a […]

Personal Journeys: The Shkarovsky Family of Pohrebyshche, Ulraine

Filed Under Personal Journeys, Україна By Joshua Skarf on August 11, 2015

Researching a Rare Family Name Shared by Levites and Israelites Shkarovsky is an uncommon Jewish surname. This can be a blessing, as the focus of research is limited; or a curse, as there is limited material with which to work. […]

Let’s Put All Our Eggs in One Basket

Filed Under Avotaynu Features, Collaboration, Crowdsourcing By Sallyann Sack-Pikus and Gary Mokotoff on August 7, 2015

At an ever-increasing pace, creators of genealogically useful databases are posting them on the Internet—and scattering them in a variety of different locations. Some may be found on the website of a Jewish genealogical society; others are on JewishGen; still […]

Personal Journeys: A Leaf in the Genealogy Tree, by Madeleine Isenberg

Filed Under Austria-Czech-Slovak, Personal Journeys By Madeleine Isenberg on August 4, 2015

I’ve been working on my family tree for about 20 years now and helping others find their roots, branches, or leaves in theirs somewhat less than that. My work, while it is something of a hobby, is quite intense. Now […]

Personal Journeys: A Trove of Family Letters Yields a Novel, by Julie Freestone

Filed Under Personal Journeys By Julie Freestone on July 28, 2015

I was four years old when my mother, Mathilda Gruber Conan, and my sister Laura and I joined my father Abraham Conan (née Makovietzki), in Germany where he was working as part of the Allied High Command Occupation Forces. He […]

Personal Journeys: Searching for Stones, by Madeleine Isenberg

Filed Under Austria-Czech-Slovak, Personal Journeys By Madeleine Isenberg on July 28, 2015

No matter how much you ask people for their help, there are times you just have to do it all yourself. Take my quest which became a hunt for stones, to find more about a distant relative whose name was […]

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