I am very pleased to announce that Dr. Neil Rosenstein has agreed to
coordinate a team to translate the inscriptions on tombstones for
JewishGen's Online Worldwide Burial Registry (JOWBR). Neil is on the
Board of Rav-SIG, he initiated the Brody Cemetery Project with 2
other persons, and he is the author of numerous important Jewish
rabbinic genealogical publications. He is uniquely qualified to
coordinate this project and we are grateful that he will be helping
JOWBR.

This team will be of tremendous assistance to people who have been
photographing tombstones in Jewish cemeteries worldwide but are
finding it difficult to translate the inscriptions. This translation
team is being put together to answer requests for translation
assistance >from these volunteers.

This message has two purposes:

1) to ask for volunteers who can work with Neil on translating
inscriptions on matzevot. Knowledge of Hebrew primarily, and in some
cases Yiddish, Polish, Russian, and other native languages, is a
prerequisite. Volunteers should also have a copy of Excel on their
computers as the translated data will be input in the Excel template
at http://www.jewishgen.org/databases/cemetery/. If you would like
to help on this important project, please contact Neil at
neil@....

2) to remind volunteers who are photographing tombstones to send the
jpeg images on a CD-ROM disk to Neil if they need the inscriptions
translated. Please send the donor agreement located at
http://www.jewishgen.org/databases/cemetery/ to Harriet Brown so that
she can add that cemetery to our tracking form and let her know that
the CD-ROM disk has been sent to Neil. After the inscriptions are
translated and the data entered on our template, Neil will forward
the completed spreadsheet to the JOWBR technical coordinator. The
address for sending the CD-ROM disks to Neil will be posted at
http://www.jewishgen.org/databases/cemetery/ in a few days.

If you have any questions, please send them to me at jfield@....

Joyce Field
JewishGen VP, Research