For a conference dedicated to mining the past, the 44th International Conference on Jewish Genealogy offered plenty of opportunities that looked to the future, covering topics like enhanced DNA testing and the best ways to deploy AI for research.
The five-day conference in Philadelphia was hosted by the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies, with the local host the Jewish Genealogical and Archival Society of Greater Philadelphia. It began on Sunday, Aug. 18, and wrapped up on Thursday, Aug. 22.
This was the IAJGS’s first in-person conference in the United States since the pandemic and the first in Philadelphia since 2009. Last year’s was in-person in London, and next year’s is scheduled for Fort Wayne, Ind.
“Virtual programs like Zoom were a godsend during the COVID years,” Jane Berenbeim, president of IAJGS, said in a statement. “But when it comes to informing, instructing and inspiring people who want to learn where they came from, there’s no substitute for real people-to-people contact.”
In addition to networking and schmoozing, there were plenty of hugs and shouts of recognition throughout the event held at the Sheraton Philadelphia Downtown Hotel. Some people even discovered that they were related to fellow conferees, which happened to a woman from the Philadelphia area and a woman from Australia. Another attendee mentioned how she was related to Jewish gangster Meyer Lansky.
Those types of serendipitous discoveries are hallmarks of the conference, said those who worked on the proceedings.
According to conference chair Fred Blum, more than 900 people attended the event.
Organizers received some 600 proposals for talks, which had to be whittled down to about 175, according to Blum. Those lectures involved some of the top people in the field of Jewish and international genealogy, and included such topics as “Jewish Roots in Belarus, Poland and Ukraine: What’s New and Where Is It?” “How to Read a Jewish Tombstone,” “How to Work with the Jewish Records of Vienna” and “Overcoming Jewish DNA Obstacles with YDNA and mtDNA.”
There were also computer labs, panel discussions, talks for beginners, sessions with mentors and translators, vendors and representatives of local, national and international libraries and institutions like Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. The keynote speaker on Sunday night was author and Jewish cuisine expert Joan Nathan.
At its heart, organizers said, the convention provided a way to honor the past while informing the present and preserving stories about Jewish families for the future.
With Philadelphia’s ties to some of the earliest Jewish experiences in America, the conference provided attendees ways to see some of those sites up close and personal while learning more about genealogical records in the region.
That included a walking tour of the city’s “Jewish Quarter” and docent-led tours of the nearby Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History. Lecture topics included “Pier 53: Bringing Jewish Roots to Philadelphia,” “A Tale of Generations: The Mikveh Israel Archives and Tracing Jewish Lineage” and “Using HIAS’s Philadelphia Records to Trace Your Family’s Immigration Journey.”
One of the groups staffing information booths was the Holocaust Reunion Project, which had officially launched that week as an independent nonprofit. The organization’s goal, said co-founders Jennifer Mendelsohn and Adina Newman, is to use DNA testing to enable Holocaust survivors and their children to help reclaim family history by finding relatives they never knew existed.
To that end, they provide free DNA tests to survivors and their children, and free expert genealogical research to those families. Where documents don’t exist, DNA testing can provide a way forward, said Mendelsohn, including for children smuggled out of Jewish ghettos.
Both she and Newman spoke about how rewarding it is to reunite fragmented families. “We hear all the time that survivors told their kids they were the only ones left,” Mendelsohn told JNS. “It’s not always true.”
One of the many highlights of the conference was a lecture and series of films involving retired Philadelphia-area journalist David Lee Preston, whose parents were Holocaust survivors. He focused on his mother, Halina Wind Preston, one of 10 Jews who survived by hiding for 14 months in the sewers of Lviv, Ukraine. They were saved by Polish Catholic sewer workers who had risked their own lives to help them.
Preston spoke about discovering his late mother’s diaries nearly a decade ago, and he read from some of those passages. Four short films were shown connected to his mother’s remarkable journey, including documenting Preston’s return to Lviv after the fall of the Soviet Union.
A first-timer’s experience
Interested in my family history since I was a child, this was my first-ever genealogy conference. The flood of information seemed overwhelming at times, but that was more than made up for by the embrace and encouragement of other attendees, both conference veterans and newbies alike. The panels provided plenty of fodder for future inquiries.
And while I have had some success charting my family roots from London, that was not the case with family from Hungary and what is now Ukraine in sub-Carpathia. But thanks to the help of a couple of experts, and then additional research by Yad Vashem and the D.C. Holocaust museum, a new trail emerged.
It led me to discover that my great-great-uncle’s son gave video testimony to the USC Shoah Foundation in the 1990s. The video is in Russian, but the relative showed pictures of my family before the war and mentioned the names of his children and grandchildren. What’s more, the interview took place in Brooklyn, N.Y., leaving plenty of family research to explore ahead of next year’s conference.
