Spotlight on International Members

The IAJGS board has decided to feature a new column entitled "Spotlight," which will feature new projects by our international members. This month's focus is on Israel!

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 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 at:

http://www.isragen.org.il/NROS/Research/YVS.html

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 about it and organize yourselves accordingly by first familiarizing yourselves with this project. Go to the following URL

http://www1.yadvashem.org/names/whyCollect.htm

and read through all the pages at this address. Then download the materials toolkit at:

http://www1.yadvashem.org/names/Toolkit.htm

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!