Last week was the 32nd annual IAJGS Conference on Jewish Genealogy in Paris, France.

During the Tuesday night gala, the following awards were announced:

The IAJGS Lifetime Achievement Award went to Dr. Jeffrey S. Malka for his pioneering work in Sephardic genealogical studies. The award for Outstanding Contribution via Internet went to Logan Kleinwaks for his Genealogy Indexer web site. ViewMate was given the award for Outstanding Program or Project, conceived and initiated by Bernard Kouchel. The award for Outstanding Publication went to Shemot, the journal of the JGS of Great Britain.

The Rabbi Malcolm Stern Grant was awarded to two organizations: The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, to continue digitizing and indexing of records in their archives, and the Israel Genealogy Research Association, to complete a search engine that can handle both English and Hebrew for the data they have been collecting in Israeli archives.

Congratulations to all the winners!

In addition to the awards, the Annual Meeting attendees re-elected the current Board of Directors for another term. The meeting was also broadcast via webinar for the first time.

Future conference locations were announced and speculated: 2013 in Boston, 2014 in Salt Lake City, 2015 in Jerusalem, 2016 in the Pacific Northwest (likely Seattle, Portland, or Vancouver), 2017 on the east coast of the US, and 2018 in Eastern Europe, most likely Warsaw.

UJGS members in attendance this year included Banai Feldstein, Todd Knowles, Kahlile Mehr, and Robert Neu.