A pit that rainfall exposed at a former Jewish cemetery in Iasi, Romania in October 2020, (©Dan Acostioaiei)

Heavy rainfall in northeastern Romania exposed an underground chamber full of headstones from a Jewish cemetery that was destroyed in 1943. The cave is in Tatarasi Park in Iasi. This is near the site where Nazi allies stole

thousands of headstones from the ancient Ciurchi Street Jewish Street cemetery. Historian Adrian Cioflancc said the oldest documented graves in the cemetery date to 1467.

The pogrom in Iasi in 1941 murdered 15,000 Jews.

The cemetery, which had more than 20,000 graves, was razed on orders from Ion Antonescu, Romania’s wartime prime minister.

The Jews of Bucharest were allowed to move thousands of bodies to another cemetery, but thousands more were desecrated. The headstones removed were used as construction material on orders from Iasi’s mayor, Constantin Ifrim.

See: https://www.jta.org/quick-reads/heavy-rain-reveals-remains-from-romanian-jewish-cemetery-destroyed-by-fascists

Jan Meisels Allen

Chairperson, IAJGS Public Records Access Monitoring Committee

The U.S. Supreme Court approved a request from the Trump Administration to suspend the lower federal court’s order that extended the census count to October 31.The Court offered no explanation for the decision, which required the support of at least five justices. Justice Sonia Sotomayor issued a written dissent. She called the harms from ending the count early “avoidable and intolerable.” Further she said, “even a fraction of a percent of the Nation’s 140 million households amounts to hundreds of thousands of people left uncounted,” she wrote. “And significantly, the percentage of nonresponses is likely much higher among marginalized populations and in hard-to-count areas, such as rural and tribal lands.”

The ruling was a result from the Justice Department’s emergency request made last week.  Previously, 9^th Circuit Federal Appellate Court Judge Lucy Koh, said the count was to continue through October 31.  The extension was made due to COVID-19 and the October 31 date had been proposed by the Administration last April which they then changed their mind in July.

As the previous Judges have ruled, the October 31 date would give the bureau a better chance of getting an accurate and complete count of the country's residents, which is used to determine how political representation and federal funding are distributed among the states over the next decade. The numbers, in turn, also determine how many Electoral College votes each state has to determine who becomes the U.S. president in 2024 and 2028. The count also determines how approximately $1.5 trillion in federal spending is directed. The proposed deadlines would have pushed field collection until the end of October, with each state's congressional districts being submitted to the president by April 30, 2021, instead of the year-end statutory deadline.

Justice Department attorneys say the Census Bureau is under pressure to meet a legal deadline of Dec. 31 for reporting to the president the first set of census results — the latest state population counts that determine each state's share of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives.

Experts, both inside and outside the agency, have expressed concern over a shortened timeframe for the constitutionally mandated count, arguing that a politically motivated, shortened timeline due to the pandemic threatened the census on two ends: both the actual enumeration and the data processing that follows. A report from Commerce Department's Office of Inspector General in September found that the decision to accelerate the census schedule “was not made by the Census Bureau” and that it “increases the risks to obtaining a complete and accurate 2020 Census.”

The Census Bureau is under the Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross. If the Secretary of Commerce were to present the new state counts to the White House by Dec. 31, that would ensure that even if President Trump did not win reelection, he could attempt to carry out the unprecedented change he wants to make to who is counted when determining the reallocation of House seats.

A different legal fight before the Supreme Court which they have not said when they will hear, is the requirement of "whole number of persons in each state" and the president's limited authority over the census.  President Trump wants to exclude unauthorized immigrants from being counted.

To read more see:

https://www.npr.org/2020/10/13/921428056/supreme-court-allows-trump-administration-to-end-census-early

and

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/13/supreme-court-allows-census-count-to-cease-429248

To read more see:

https://www.npr.org/2020/10/07/920206851/appeals-court-denies-another-attempt-to-end-census-early-by-trump-officials

To access the previous postings about the 2020 US Census see the IAJGS Records Access Alert archives at: http://lists.iajgs.org/mailman/private/records-access-alerts   You must be registered to access the archives.

To register for the IAJGS Records Access Alert go to: http://lists.iajgs.org/mailman/listinfo/records-access-alerts.  You will receive an email response that you have to reply to or the subscription will not be finalized.

It is required to include your organization affiliation (genealogy organization, etc.)

Jan Meisels Allen

Chairperson, IAJGS Public Records Access Monitoring Committee

The British Library has released an archive of nearly 18,000 maps and views –digitized—and no copyright restrictions.  Access is free!

The collection is from the Topographical Collection of King George lll and held by the British Library for four centuries of visual  impressions of places throughout the world, from maps and atlases to architectural drawings, cartoons and watercolors. 

Once the collection is totally digitized, the Library plans to make entire collection of 40,000 maps and views available.

The collection is arranged geographically, with around 40% dedicated to the British Isles, one third covering the Europe of the Grand Tour, and 10% for British areas of influence such as North America, the West Indies and India.

There are two planned image releases:

1. British Library’s Georeferencer (http://britishlibrary.georeferencer.com/start) an interactive application that allows volunteers to turn maps into data by adding locations to digitized British Library collections,

       initiating new forms of discovery and research.

1. Fiickr  (https://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary/albums/72157716220271206  and can be searched for in the Library’s archive at http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do

To read more see: https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2020/10/13/british-library-releases-18000-maps-and-views-for-free/

Thank you to Jeanette Rosenberg, JGS Great Britain for sharing this information with us.

Jan Meisels Allen

Chairperson, IAJGS Public Records Access Monitoring Committee