Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain Blog

Our next meeting in the JGSGB Virtual Meeting Programme is from the JGSGB Eastern European Special Interest Group (EE SIG) by Zoom. • Date: Sunday 30 May 2021 • Time: 14:00 London; 09:00 New York; 16:00 Jerusalem • Title: From Losice to London – A Story of Courage • Speaker: Warren Grynberg • Description: Warren’s talk centres around his father leaving the ghetto in the far east of Poland, onto Siberia and then joining the British Army. After the talk, there will be an opportunity for Q&A and discussion on the talk. About Warren Grynberg ====================== Warren Grynberg has been a London Blue Badge Tour Guide for the past twenty-four years. He previously worked in book publishing for many years and has written four London history books. At the age of nineteen he volunteered to go to Israel to help out during the Six Day War – and then volunteered to go into the Israeli Army. He was a magistrate for over fifteen years until age called...

Our next meeting in the JGSGB Virtual Meeting Programme is from the JGSGB Eastern European Special Interest Group (EE SIG) on a Lithuanian and Latvian theme by Zoom. • Date: Sunday 23 May 2021 • Time: 14:00 London; 09:00 New York; 16:00 Jerusalem • Title: “Internal Passports in Lithuania and Latvia & Pitfalls in Researching the Origins of Rebecca Bloom” • Speaker: Arlene Beare • Description: Arlene will ensure that you get your money’s worth with two talks on Lithuania and Latvia. The first is about internal passports in the former Russian Empire and after 1919 in Lithuania and Latvia. The second is more personal about her research into her grandmother’s Lithuanian and Latvian origins. After each talk, there will be an opportunity for Q&A and discussion on the talk. About Arlene Beare =================== Arlene was born in South Africa and emigrated to the UK with her husband and three children in 1974. She is a retired consultant physi...

More videos will be uploaded over the next couple of weeks. The meetings below are now available to watch for free. Please like and share!   • Daniela Weil - Dutch Brazil and the first Jews of New York • Jacob Marrache Fischel - Jewish Genealogy in Morocco • Alain Nedjar - Livorno Sephardic Marriage Registers • Jarrett Ross - Family Nunes Vaz, a Journey of Western Sephardic genealogy • Aviva ben-Ur - Suriname: Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society • Adam Brown - Sephardic DNA project • Heide Warncke - Highlights from the Ets Haim collection • Michael Waas - Muestro Yerusha: Jewish heritage and Identity in the Ottoman Empire • Noam Sienna - Rabbis with inky fingers: Making the 18th Century Hebrew Book • Stanley Mirvis - The Jews of Eighteenth Century Jamaica • Laura Arnold Leibman - The Art of the Jewish Family: A History of Women in Early New...

Our next meeting in the JGSGB Virtual Meeting Programme is a specialist talk on a Sephardic theme by Zoom. • Date: Sunday 16 May 2021 • Time: 14:00 London; 09:00 New York; 16:00 Jerusalem • Title: Breaking with the Past: The Jews of Spain before the Expulsion • Speaker: Dr Cecil Reid • Description: Spain was a crucible of social change in the 14th and 15th centuries. This was the case no more so than for the Jews: their remarkable millennium of cultural coexistence with their Christian and Muslim neighbours would end with their expulsion in 1492. But even before this final act, the communities came under an ever-increasing threat that was both physical and cultural. In this talk Dr. Reid considers the highs and the lows of Jewish life in these last two fraught centuries of the Middle Ages. The changes that affected the communities provide a colourful but also a tragic backdrop to a unique chapter of European Jewish history, one that had repercussions...

From Yad Vashem: Jews in the Red Army, 1941–1945  About the Project From 1941 to 1945 between 350,000 and 500,000 Jews served in various roles in the Red Army during the Soviet-German war of 1941-1945. During the first months of the war a large number of Jews, especially members of the intelligentsia and students, served in the Narodnoe opolchenie (National Guard or militia), the irregular military units whose task was to slow and, hopefully, halt the Wehrmacht assaults on major Soviet cities. The majority of those in the Narodnoe opolchenie, who were poorly trained and poorly armed, were killed in the first months of the war. In the Red Army itself the estimates of the number of Jews killed during the war range from 120,000 to 142,000. The 100 accounts of Jews in the Red Army that are included in the present project highlight those who received formal recognition, primarily as Heroes of the Soviet Union, of their military achievements. However, there are also many biographies o...

Members may be interested to browse the Wiener Library's videos channel on You Tube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheW ienerLibrary/videos         Thanks to Jeanette Rosenberg for passing this on.