Meetings
JGSWS meets in the auditorium of the Stroum JCC on the second Monday of each month, September through June, at 7 PM, unless noted otherwise. Admission is free for JGSWS members, $5 for nonmembers.
MEETING LOCATION: Stroum Jewish Community Center
3801 East Mercer Way, Mercer Island, (206) 232-7115
Driving directions >>
The JGSWS library will be available before and after the presentation.
WiFi also will be available—bring your laptops.
NEXT MEETING: Monday, February 8, 2010
Doors open at 7 PM.
Presentation starts promptly at 7:30 PM.
"Reading in Another Hand: Deciphering Cyrillic and Hebrew Archival Documents from Eastern Europe," presented by Natan M. Meir
ABOUT OUR PROGRAM
This lecture/workshop will elucidate some of the foundational elements of the Russian and Hebrew/Yiddish cursive scripts used in the Russian Empire in the 19th and early 20th centuries. We will discuss the Cyrillic and Hebrew alphabets, their use in various types of archival documents, key words and phrases that appear in documents of interest to genealogists, and the structure of tsarist and Soviet archives. We will also view a number of archival documents and work together to decipher words and phrases. Attendees are encouraged to contact the presenter in advance with specific documents or questions with which they have had difficulty, and some of those will then be integrated into the presentation (programs@jgsws.org).
ABOUT OUR SPEAKER
Natan Meir was born in Jerusalem and raised in New Jersey and Quebec. He received his Ph.D. in Jewish history from Columbia University in 2003. He is the Lorry I. Lokey Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies at Portland State University. His scholarly interest is modern Jewish history, focusing on the social and cultural history of East European Jewry in the 19th and 20th centuries. His first book, Kiev: Jewish Metropolis, 1859-1914, is forthcoming from Indiana University Press, and he is now at work on a second project tentatively titled Jewish Marginals in Eastern Europe.
For more information, please e-mail programs@jgsws.org.
FUTURE MEETINGS
March 8: TBD
April 12: TBD
OTHER LOCAL EVENTS
See the Events page.