Dear GerSIGgers,

The 39th IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy in
Cleveland, Ohio concluded on Friday and was a great success.
The JewishGen German-Jewish SIG (GerSIG) was able to greet a number of
familiar and several new faces at the SHARE fare, our breakfast, lunch
and annual meeting.

As promised, I'm providing a summary of GerSIG's conference activities
and news. See our News post on our website at:
https://www.jewishgen.org/gersig/ABT_newsArchive.asp?#113
for additional details.

Databases that will become available through JewishGen's all Germany
database in the next few weeks: Leo Baeck Institute (LBI) Family Tree
Index (Phase I) , Data >from Jewish Genealogy in Bavarian Swabia
(https://jgbs.org/), with many thanks to the creator of the site,
Ralph Bloch.
Also Aufbau Family Notices (currently available at
http://calzareth.com/aufbau/search.html ) - see below for the
continuation of the indexing project

*** Call for Volunteers ***

GerSIG has four ongoing projects - Wuerttemberg
Family Registers, East German Gatermann Vital Records, Surname
Adoption Lists (West of the Rhine) and Aufbau Family Notices For more
information on each project see:
https://www.jewishgen.org/gersig/TPL_Base.asp?id=3D23

Please join our growing team of indexers by contacting our Volunteer
Coordinator, Ren'e Klish at museumcurator40@gmail.com

****GerSIG Website ****

A new GerSIG website was released at the Warsaw Conference
in 2018 - please visit https://www.jewishgen.org/gersig/ to see an
example of the resource we would like to build, please visit the page
for Karlsruhe at:
https://www.jewishgen.org/gersig/GEO_town.asp?id=3D1803994

*** Select New Resources: ***

German Refugee Rabbis in the United States of America -
http://mira.geschichte.lmu.de/

Index of all 1939 German Minority Census data:
https://www.mappingthelives.org/

Peter Lande's index to the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland
has been updated through the letter S - the database is available at:
https://stevemorse.org/jewishroof/jewishroof.html
and the original cards can be seen through:
https://arolsen-archives.org/en/search-explore/search-online-archive/

Peter's database allows for additional search criteria such as the
town of birth.

Jewish Places - https://www.jewish-places.de/ - Work in progress (only
available in German), introductory information in English at
https://www.jmberlin.de/en/jewish-places

Obermayer German Jewish History Awards - http://obermayer.us/award/ -
Nominations Due September 8, 2019
Obermayer Anniversary Awards -
http://obermayer.us/award/anniversary-award/anniversary-award.htm -
Nominations Due September 15, 2019

*** GerSIG Email list and GerSIG Facebook group ***

If you are on Facebook, please consider joining our Facebook group at
https://www.facebook.com/groups/GerSIGGermanJewishGenealogy/ . This
is intended as an enhancement and not a replacement of the mailing
list. Please continue to post introductory message, questions
regarding brick wall ancestors and best practices for using
German-Jewish resources, including websites.

Other Facebook Groups focusing on German-Jews:
Hamburg: https://www.facebook.com/groups/hamburgjewishancestors/
Posen: https://www.facebook.com/groups/jewsfromposen/

*** San Diego 2020 ***

GerSIG is looking for suggested speakers to sponsor to give several
lectures at next year's IAJGS conferences. Prior year speakers include
Malgorzata Ploszaj, Dr. Bettina Joergens, Stephen Falk, Dr. Yochai
Ben-Ghedalia, Joachim Hahn, Bozena Kubit, Gerhard Buck, Bernhard Purin
and Friedrich Wollmershaeuser, who have spoken on German Records and
various German-Jewish communities including those in Upper Silesia,
Baden-Wuerttemberg, Nassau and Munich. Please forward your suggestions
to Alex Calzareth.

**** Honoring Fritz Neubauer ****

Thanks to John Lowens, GerSIG's moderator, for composing the following
tribute on behalf of GerSIG:

"I hope that this helps." There are over 500 messages >from Fritz Neubauer
in the GerSIG Email list archives with that closing phrase.
With the illness and passing of Fritz Neubauer, GerSIG lost an
irreplaceable helper and friend.

He taught languages at The University of Bielefeld in northern Germany
but if you were to visit him in his office there you'd assume his
field to be Holocaust history. Next to Dr. Neubauer's desk was a
collection of Shoah memorial books containing the names and details of
Holocaust victims. When GerSIG members posted messages about "brick
walls" in their German Jewish family research, Fritz routinely
searched this personal library and, sometimes, found the missing
people. Many of his GerSIG messages gave families of Shoah victims
their first concrete information about their lost relatives.

His help to GerSIG, JewishGen and Shoah research included providing
translations. He was an expert on the tragic history of the Lodz
Ghetto. The U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington has 2,400 pages of
letters >from Ghetto residents to friends and relatives outside, which
Fritz helped translate and index.

A search of the SIG list message archives for fritz.neubauer@uni-bielefeld.de
will reveal what we were hoping for when GerSIG was organized at the 1998
Conference.

Thank you, Fritz Neubauer. You DID help. We have lost a dear friend.
May his memory be a blessing.

*****
We look forward to welcoming many of you to next year's conference,
the 40th, which will take place in San Diego, California.
Please stay in touch through our mailing list and through Facebook!

Alex Calzareth Long Island City, New York acalzareth@jewishgen.org
JewishGen Director of Research for Germany on behalf of the GerSIG Team