Lara Diamond leads two dynamic sessions on Jewish genealogy.
First Session 10:30 a.m.-12 p.m.
“Jewish Genealogy 101”
This talk gives a comprehensive overview of genealogy resources available for Jewish genealogy. The presentation will include online sources and documents not yet online for both the United States and Europe; she will also cover some basic knowledge critical to researching one’s Jewish roots.
12 p.m. to 1 p.m.
Break (no lunch provided)
Second Session 1 p.m.-3 p.m.
“Defying Expectations: The Story of a Jewish Woman Who Took on the Russian Empire.”
Chava Lefand (1797-1884) lived in a time when we’d expect a woman to not be well-represented in documentation. And in fact, looking at traditional genealogical documents gives little information about Chava and the life she lived. But Chava’s story shows how much can be learned by looking at non-traditional documentation to learn about an individual and the context in which they lived. Chava had already lost two children to mandatory conscription into the Russian Empire, and she refused to lose another. The widowed mother filed a series of petitions throughout the 1850s which went as high as two Czars and the Governing Senate (the Russian Empire’s Supreme Court equivalent). In doing this, she generated a genealogical gold mine (telling of secret marriages and here various relatives were living or hiding from the draft) and gave her perspective on family and community gossip and conflict.
While this is the talk about one woman (the speaker’s 5th great grandmother), her hundreds of pages of petitions and appeals tell her perspective of how Jewish families dealt with mandatory conscription of their young children, how conscription caused strife within the Jewish community and formed a hierarchy (she felt she wasn’t part of the cool kids’ clique), and how relatively simple Jewish families were able to generate a significant amount of documentation in the mid-1800s.
This program is possible through the generous support of the William M. Lowenstein Genealogical Research Endowment Fund of the Jewish Community Foundation.