I want to thank everyone who attended and especially our fabulous cadre of speakers for making this perhaps the best conference in the 14 year history of our SIG.
We began strongly on Sunday with the terrific presentations by Paul King (Israel) on the Familianten decree and Thomas Fuerth (Sweden) on tracing the identity of the senders of telegrams to his grandparents' weddingin Vienna.
On Tuesday, our guest speaker Lenka Matusikova (Czech Republic) presented not one, but two amazing presentations describing archival and online resources in the Czech State Archives and elsewhere. We are very lucky to have someone like Lenka working to make our records public, and it was so nice for all of us to see her in Boston and learn more about her work. She told us of a few more resources that should become available in the next 12 months, including over 1,000 duplicate control record books and the Familianten books, as well as a collection of thousands of postwar death declarations that could allow us to trace the fate of victims of the Holocaust. After so many years of struggling without access to records, it is hard to believe our sudden good fortune in having all of them at our fingertips.
Everyone agreed that the SIG meeting on Tuesday was the best attended in our history. I went through a review of what is new and available to us for Austria and the Czech Republic. The powerpoint is available for download (29mb) at http://www.jewishgen.org/austriaczech/SIG2013.ppt. At the end we discussed the items on our agenda.
We had several volunteers that wanted to help work on or organize an indexing project for the Czech vital records available on badatelna.cz. Those who are interested should send me an e-mail because I forgot to write down all your names. All volunteers are welcome (not just those at the conference). We are just at the planning stages, so we need to define the scope and methodology, so we don't get overwhelmed and have to abandon the project because of burn-out. So please e-mail me if you are interested in helping to transcribe. I think we will begin with just the indices that are available for some of the towns, which are often easier to decipher.
We discussed the possible availability of cemetery records. There are several projects underway in the Czech Republic and we need to aggregate the data and get it onto the JOWBR database. Julius Mueller wrote that he might be able to help with this. I am hoping also to have discussions with MATANA, the agency responsible for maintaining Czech Jewish cemeteries, about making their database for Prague available.
Translation of Hugo Gold chapters are continuing. We discussed where to place these translations. I think the consensus was that there would not be any set rule or guidelines. The possibilities include Yizkor Book pages, KehillaLinks or Geni project pages. In some cases, the Hugo Gold chapter will probably be placed on all three pages. (I confirmed later with Susan Leistner Bloch that she will accept these translations for KehillaLinks, if that is what is desired.)
I discussed an upcoming trip to Prague and southern Bohemia in the first week of October to attend the re-dedication of the synagogue in Ckyne, which has been restored and will become a cultural center. My gggg-grandfather was the rabbi when the synagogue was built and I intend to attend with my son, who will just had his bar mitzvah. A number of other Ckyne descendants intend to be there, including Alex Woodle, who has been very involved int he restoration project.
Finally, I asked for nominations for the roles of webmaster, moderator and coordinator. Despite my pleading, no one volunteered and I suppose I will have to continue on in those roles, which I am of course happy to do if no one else would like a turn.
At the SIG luncheon, which was unfortunately sold out too soon so a number of people were unable to attend, I spent the last thirty minutes telling the story of the Klimt paintings that I helped recover for the Bloch-Bauer family. This was a reprise of the keynote speech I gave in Chicago in 2008, but it felt better in this more intimate setting and I think everyone, even those who had been in Chicago, enjoyed hearing the story.
On Wednesday afternoon, our presentations concluded with Chuck Weinstein and his research tracking down the fate of the residents of the town of Misslitz in Moravia and the Czech torah scroll at his temple.
Besides these Austria-Czech events, I of course spent much of the conference talking about our work on Geni.com. After working together with so many of you on Geni over the past 12 months, the conference felt simply like a continuation of our regular discussions. As I said in concluding the SIG meeting, there has never been a better time to do Austrian-Czech Jewish genealogy. I am convinced that there is no other SIG that has advanced as far as we have in establishing a broad-based network of connected trees. I have always sought to help people with their research, but increasingly I am finding that it takes only a matter of minutes to connect them to the tree we have created. An example of this was Dvora Caspi, who came to the conference for the first time, wearing around her neck the conference pass with the surnames Karpeles, Klemperer, Schlosser -- all easily recognizable as Prague families. Within a few minutes of sitting down with her, she had, for the first time in her life, an enormous family, with most branches going deep into the 18th century and dozens of new cousins. This is the result of the collaborative efforts of our SIG and to those, like Lenka Matusikova, who have made records of our ancestors available to us.
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