The 2013 Jewish Genealogy Conference in Boston was a great success. We
want to thank the organizers for doing an amazing job. We also want to thank
Dr. Michael Lozman for speaking at our Luncheon about his valuable work restoring
cemeteries in Eastern Europe. And thanks to all the Belarus SIG researchers
in attendance at the luncheon and the conference in general.

Paul Zoglin the Belarus SIG database coordinator
introduced a spreadsheet format inventory of birth death marriage
divorce and revision list records that hopefully will be very
useful to researchers. A link to that will be posted in a couple weeks.

Researchers who have commissioned private researchers to search through
record books in the archives in Belarus (or other locations with Belarus records)
should let Paul know about those sources to make sure they have been included
ed in his inventory. Paul will be on vacation until August 19th with limited
internet access so he may not be able to respond to people who have questions
until after August 19th.We had productive discussions with our SIG neighbors
about sharing data relating to border towns and we hope to have better
coordination in the future. We had several discussions with JewishGen about
the future plans of the SIG and how JewishGen can best support us and many
issues were resolved. Thanks to Warren Blatt Michael Tobias and Avraham Groll
their support.

Paul met Yochai Ben Ghedalia the director of the Central Archive for the
History of the Jewish People in Jerusalem which has records >from Belarus.The
inventory is on index cards in Russian but has not been translated. The archive
will allow researchers to photograph these cards. If someone would be willing
to go to the archive and do that for us we could get them translated and include
the information in the inventory of record sources.
Contact Paul if you can help with this.

We are looking forward to a very productive year.
Dave Feldman Belarus SIG Co-coordinator (david.feldman@...)

Sharon Fingold Belarus
SIG Co-coordinator (sfingold@...)
Ruth Silver Research Coordinator
(rescoord@...)
Paul Zoglin Database Coordinator (paulmz@...) =