Dear Ukraine SIG members:

JewishGen is pleased to announce a major new research initiative.
This is something we have been working on for many months with Flo
Elman supporting these efforts. Along with the Ukraine SIG, the
Research Division is starting the" Odessa Rabbinat Fond Project,"
which will transliterate the data located in the Odessa Archives

from 2000 registers with 1000-2000 names in each register covering

the years 1846-1920. These registers >from Odessa city cover birth,
death, marriage and divorce. Birth registers are >from 1846-47 and
1875-1920. Marriage, divorce, and death registers are >from the
years 1854, 1875-1920.

The transliteration and data entry into spreadsheets will take place
in Odessa and the data will be transmitted electronically to
JewishGen. A freely accessible searchable database will be created
and housed on the
JewishGen databases at http://www.jewishgen.org/databases/ and will
be incorporated into the All-Ukraine Database. The fields in the
database will contain all the information in the original records.

This multi-year project, working with the fragile original records
which are in Russian Cyrillic and difficult to read, will be
expensive, no doubt about it. <g> The costs of transliteration and
data entry of 200,000-400,000 names as well as the costs to
JewishGen to create and house this massive database need to be
covered by donations.

To get this underway, a fundraising project has been set up at
http://www.jewishgen.org/JewishGen-erosity/Research.html awaiting
your donations. All donations through JewishGen-erosity are tax
deductible according to law. We have targeted $5,000 as the amount
needed before we
can actually begin work,

Please be as generous as you can. The people in Odessa are ready to
begin immediately. There is much more research material available to
us if we can raise the funds.

Joyce Field
JewishGen Vice President, Research
jfield@...