Dear Members of the Belaru SIG:

Last night I attended a special meeting of the Jewish Genealogy Society
of Greater Washington (JGSGW), my local JGS. The guest speaker was Dr.
Yaacov Lozowick, Director of the Yad Vashem Archives. As the
"Washington Post" reported in a front page article of December 1, 1998,
" A vast project is underway at Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust
institution, to construct a detailed electronic portrait of European
Jewry on the eve of the Holocuasut and during its destruciton. The
result would be a huge computerized datbase yielding a mosaic of peronal
information on millions of victims of the Nazis more comprehensive than
anything available before". The complete text of this article can be
found on the following URL until December 14. If you want to print out
a copy do so before that date:

<http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1998-12/01/050l-120198-idx.html>

At the meeting Dr. Lozowick indicated that Yad Vashem has developed a
"List of Lists" on a computer database which he had on a PC at the
meeting. What Yad Vashem has done is collect lists of Jews (in some
cases non-Jews) >from a variety of sources and archives, including
archives in the Former Soviet Union (FSU). Some of these lists are
people sent to death camps, slave labor, etc. Others are lists of
surviors. One of the lists is the Red Cross list which everyone is
already familiar with. Another is the Hall of Names list which Yad
Vashem compiles >from the pages of testimony. There are thousands of
lists representing 18 million name entries. Some of these names appear
in more then one list.

The data entry and consoldiation of these lists into a usable database
is expected to take at least three years. So genealogists will have to
wait for access to this valuable resource. However, there are some
interim steps we can use to get access to some of this data before the
three years are up. This will require going to the Yad Vashem archives
in person. Mail request for information can not be honored because of
limited staffing at Yad Vashem.

After the meeting, I asked Dr. Lozowick to search his "List of Lists"
database to see if there were any lists of names for Mogilev and
Rogachev. Sure enough there were. I can only assume that there are
other locations in Belarus for which there are lists. Now the question
of how to see these lists, which can be in a number of different
languages.

Pehaps some of our Belarus SIG members in Israel can visit Yad Vashem
and ask for access to the "List of Lists". You can seach for a town or
location, but be sure to try different spellings for the town because
there is no D/M indexing. Yad Vashem tried to use the spellings of
towns as they were in 1939, but this isn't 100 per cent. Once you have
the name of the list you are interested in, you can request that the
list be brought to you for viewing. If our Israeli SIG members have the
time, perhaps they can report back what they find on the lists and how
difficult it would be to extract names and other information.

By the way, the "List of List" is only available at Yad Vashem and a
copy will NOT be available at the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC for
the immediate future.

David Fox
fox@...
Belarus SIG Coordinator