11 April 2015

35th International Conference on Jewish Genealogy

As more and more DNA testers are finding segments of Jewish genealogy, along with all of those who know their Jewish heritage, more and more interest is turning toward understanding the connections and culture.

Barbara Hershey, President of the Jewish Genealogical Society in Portland Oregon, has alerted me to the coming International Conference on Jewish Genealogy in Jerusalem this year, and shares the following information.

Happy Passover from the 2015 IAJGS 35th International Conference on Jewish Genealogy. For the ease of those who are vacationing over the holiday, we have decided to extend the Early Registration Discount fee through Wednesday May 6, 2015. Visit www.iajgs2015.org to register now! And since we promised a drawing for prizes those registered by April 15th your chances of winning are now double! Be patient if we are slower in answering e-mails, Israel is on vacation until April 12. Ortra our Conference Organizer, like most non-essential businesses in Israel, is closed for all but emergencies. I and most of our volunteers will be answering questions as rapidly as we can.

Our Preliminary Program now is now listed in the Program & Schedule section of the website in the “Program” tab at www.iajgs2015.org. You’ll see why we are boasting that this will be “A Conference Like No Other”. The schedule will become interactive after Passover.

The conference will be truly international and the Promised Event with speakers and registrants hailing from round the globe. Among the nearly 20 nations represented to date are New Zealand, American Samoa, the Americas and all of Europe.

As announced, the keynote speaker will be Rabbi Israel Meir Lau, one of the most prominent figures in Israeli society today. (See the website for his full biography.) Rabbi Lau, a child survivor of the Holocaust,  carries a crucial message for genealogists regarding their research.

We are delighted to announce that master genealogist Dick Eastman will deliver a speech at the closing banquet. In the mid-1980s, at the dawn of the World Wide Web, Eastman pioneered one of the first online Genealogy Forums. By 1996, he created a weekly online newsletter called "Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter" which has now grown from a circulation of 100 to more than 60,000 genealogists worldwide.

And when you join us for the conference, don’t miss the pre-conference festivities:
PRE-CONFERENCE SHABBATON on the Friday-Saturday, July 3 -4 weekend preceding the Conference, followed by an UNFORGETTABLE “EXPLORATION SUNDAY” on July 5. Full and fascinating details are on the conference website www.iajgs2015.org.


THIS YEAR IN JERUSALEM!  See you in Jerusalem in July for the momentous and exciting 35th IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy!


Thank you for sharing this information, Barbara.

Enjoy,
Emily