|
In response to a question
to all the international members of the IAJGS,
Israel's two genealogical societies responded immediately with one
vital project which was coincidentally being undertaken by both
of them.
This is a project that your JGS should join hands
through helping to validate world Jewry and Yad Vashem at the same
time. This is enormously urgent; it is a last chance effort to ensure
that every Jew murdered in the Shoah is remembered and recorded.
In Israel, Cynthia Wroclawski, Outreach Manager of Yad Vashem's
Shoah Victims Names Recovery Project, gave an English presentation
of this project to a full house of Jewish
Family Research Association (JFRA) executives, members
and friends. JFRA's idea of adopting the Names
Recovery Project was spurred on by the
success of its member Trisher Wilson in reuniting a number of Holocaust
survivor families over the past few of years through utilising the
Yad Vashem Pages of Testimony as a major tool in her research.
By the same token, for several years now, the Israel
Genealogical Society (IGS)
has tried to reunite families who are seeking survivors who submitted
Pages of Testimony for their family members. The IGS
has a page on their website concerning these searches which they
are trying to help bring to fruition. Direct access to this project
can be found here.
When Yad Vashem announced the Shoah Victims Names Recovery Project,
the IGS immediately offered to join their efforts.
The IAJGS board also voted unanimously to do everything
it could to help. Together, JFRA and IGS
branches understood the vital importance of being proactive in this
last push to complement the Pages of Testimony with as many new
submissions as possible.
This is a project that all of us can join in and feel wonderful
about. Don't allow the Nazis to have obliterated the memory of our
murdered families; join the efforts of Yad Vashem and other JGS'
to remember each and every Jewish soul who was annihilated.
What can you do? Volunteer to locate and help survivors, emigrants
from destroyed communities, Second and Third generations to fill
out Pages of Testimony as best they can.
You can read
here about it and organize yourselves accordingly by
first familiarizing yourselves with this project.
Then download the materials toolkit from
here.
Organize the members of your society to go into retirement homes,
JCCs, synagogues, Jewish schools to recruit students to talk with
their grandparents and parents and friends of both, clubs, and any
and every place you can think of where you might find people who
know people who could contribute a Page of Testimony to the Jewish
People through Yad Vashem. Be proactive!!
Let us, all the Jewish Genealogical Societies, join hands in this
priceless effort!
JFRA and the IGS can and will
cover Israel, but all of the IAJGS societies need
to join them to cover the world!
|
Spotlight
on International Members