IAJGS is planning to participate at Rootstech in 2023 as a Society sponsor with both a virtual and in-person booth. Most of the IAJGS board members will be attending RootsTech.

We are hoping that some of your JGS members would be willing to volunteer to help staff the booth. There will be space for Utah JGS to exhibit some material you would like to share with potential members.

Please let me know if you have any questions and if your group can help.

Emily Garber

Board member, IAJGS

Phoenix, AZ

I told Emily that I would pass this along to our membership. Great opportunity to talk about genealogy!

USC Dornsife history Professor Wolf Gruner has helped launch an effort — the #LastSeen Project — to recover photos of the Nazis’ mass deportations, identify victims and tell their stories.

The project is called #LastSeen Project-Pictures of Nazi Deportations-it aims to locate photographs, identify victim of forced deportations and tell their stories.

Between 1938 and 1945, the Nazis deported hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children from the German Reich to ghettos and camps. Yet, so far a relatively small number of photos of deportations are known. The 550 existing photographs of deportations from the German Reich are often the last known images of the victims of persecution before they were murdered. The pictures show the crimes in a local context. The deportations took place on public squares, in front of buildings and on streets that are often still part of towns today.

Photos of Nazi mass deportations have never before been brought together, made available as a collection, and analyzed collectively in any systematic way. Nor has there been a concerted effort to search for more photos. The #LastSeen project aims to gather, analyze, and digitally publish pictures of Nazi mass deportations of Jews, Romani people and people with disabilities from the German Reich between 1938 and 1945.

The #LastSeen project is a cooperation of the Arolsen Archives, the City Archives of Munich, the Center for the Research on Antisemitism at the Technical University Berlin, the House of the Wannsee Conference memorial site, and the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research.

To read more on how you canbe involved see: https://dornsife.usc.edu/cagr-news/news/2022/04/33261-center-searches-photographs-nazi-mass-deportations-part-lastseen-project

Project Soul to Soul is a project to restore children’s shoes from Auschwitz by finding out more about the children and tell their stories. See short video at: https://www.dw.com/en/preserving-the-memories-of-children-killed-in-auschwitz/av-63355119

More information is available at: https://www.auschwitz.org/en/museum/news/touching-discoveries-in-childrens-shoes,1435.html

The International March of the Living (MOTL) has partnered with Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation and Auschwitz Memorial to preserve 8,000 displayed shoes belonging to children in a global ‘SOUL to SOUL campaign. “The murder of over 200,000 children at Auschwitz is impossible to comprehend. The contrast between the cruelty and callousness of the adult world is perhaps most vividly illustrated in Auschwitz precisely in the juxtaposition with the trusting, curious, innocent and defense- less children who were thrown into a world they could not understand. And this world is preserved in every single shoe. Only these shoes remained after so many children… Among 1.3 million people deported to Auschwitz were 232,000 children up to the age of 18. The largest numbers of children arrived at the camp in the second half of 1942. When Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz in 1945, only about 500 children under 15 years of age were left in the camp, all suffering from diseases and malnutrition.”

Immediate conservation is necessary as the shoes are in danger of disappearing as a historic documentation of the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime. In so many cases, the tiny shoes left at Auschwitz are all that is left of young Jewish children murdered by the Nazis.

The conservation project will continue for two years. International MOTL said there was a moral obligation to preserve the shoes.

For those researching older French history The French Genealogy Blog has an interesting article about ancient France and Jews and where they lived prior to their expulsion in 1394. The article has maps of how France looked at the time. It states, “that if working only with a modern map of France you will have the impression that the three main areas of Jewish communities, the Southwest, Alsace-Lorraine and Papal States and Provence survived the expulsion within France but they were not within France at the time and areas not within France at the time of the expulsion as areas were controlled by other powers:

• By the English in the far northwest and the southwest region of Aquitaine
• A tiny bit in the south belonged to the Kingdom of Navarre
• The Holy Roman Empire held the northeast
• Free Burgundy, Savoy and the Papal States owned all the rest of what is now eastern France

Paris was a special as – while Jews were not supposed to living there, most likely they were.”

Anne Mordell wrote the article and she is a professional  genealogist living in France.

She also reminds us of the language differences and that in all locations Jewish documents may also be in Hebrew.

Mordell also states the best research for each of the different regions may be done at Departmental and Municipal archives with their names, but not their websites.

To read the posting go to:

https://french-genealogy.typepad.com/genealogie/2022/09/french-jewish-genealogy-ancien-r%C3%A9gime-geography-is-important.html