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MARCH-APRIL
2012
--EDUCATION AND RESEARCH
CENTER:
--Yiddish Vinkl Book Review:
The Holocaust Through Primary Sources
is a six-book educational series intended for school-age
children and deals with various aspects of the Holocaust. A
supporter of the Museum and the director of education at a Long
Island, New York, synagogue, Diane E. Berg graciously volunteered to
read and review each of these books and report to you on her
impressions.
--CURRENT EXHIBITIONS:
--The Jews of Odessa: A Short History: In
reviewing some of my current exhibitions, I noticed that the link to
one the three parts of the exhibition was non-functional, and
perhaps was so since its inception. It is a 1906 article from the
New York Daily Tribute about "a great plot in the army", Russian
mutiny and martial law in Odessa. Please visit this short article if
you have an interest.
--THE FILMS OF TOMEK WISNIEWSKI:
Poland: Bialystok ("It Started in Bialystok"),
Zalesiany ("That's How We Hid Him").
Also, the short film "The Pencil" (no town affiliation).
--LIVING IN AMERICAN: THE JEWISH EXPERIENCE:
--The Schools of New York City:
--Brooklyn's Thomas Jefferson High
School: Yet another two yearbooks has been added to the
Museum's collection from Jefferson, from the June 1936 class
and the January-June 1968 yearbook.
The Museum has also added the names of graduates from the years
1971, 1975, 1978, 1980 and 1986. Note that for these last
five yearbooks, only the names are searchable, as the Museum has not
received any of these yearbooks to scan and upload to the database.
The Museum currently depends on grads and their families for these
books, which the Museum borrows for a short time for scanning,
subsequently returning them to their owners.
There are now seventy classes whose yearbooks are
available for your perusal on the Museum's
Jefferson database. In all (including the years where the
names of the grads have been added without the yearbook pages
themselves), the Museum has data from eighty-one yearbooks
available for searching.
For the aforementioned seventy yearbooks, one can view each yearbook cover to
cover, or simply do a search for a particular name, even a home
address (more than forty percent of the yearbooks from
Jefferson included the graduate's address at the time of
graduation). The Jefferson database now contains more than 53,000
names of graduates.
It should be mentioned that in a recent New York
Daily News city edition (pg. 78, Thursday, March 15, 2012),
there was an article about the school's upcoming championship boys
basketball game. It referred to the school's first boys basketball
championship of 1954. In this article there are featured a few scans
from one of the Jefferson 1958 yearbooks, and the Museum
of Family History is given credit for the photos in this
edition. Unfortunately, the Jefferson basketball team was edged out
by the Boys and Girls High School team and lost the game.
--THE YIDDISH WORLD:
--The Museum is still readying its next major online
exhibition re Zalmen Zylbercweig and his seven-volume Lexicon
of the Yiddish Theatre, as well as the dozens of radio clips
from his L.A. radio program of the fifties and sixties (mostly in
Yiddish) for the Museum's new On the Air! feature.
Also to come will be its intriguing and thoughtful, multimedia
exhibition entitled Lives in the Yiddish Theatre: Tributes to
a Bygone Era.
--The Museum now has
two databases for its Yiddish World section. Databases have been
constructed for two major works that contain a combined 4,800 or so
biographies of those once involved in some way in the Yiddish
theatre, i.e. Zylbercweig's Lexicon of the Yiddish Theatre,
and Zalmen Reyzen's four-volume work Lexicon of the Yiddish
Literature, Press and Philology, which contains bios of
nearly 2,000 writers.
The Museum is currently translating the Zylbercweig
opus, but has no plans to translate the Reyzen work.
The Museum wishes to make these databases available
on its site for anyone at anytime to access freely, but it hasn't
anyone to construct it, and, in the absence of any funding they will
not be created. However, if anyone has a request, e.g. a name, to
look up, please contact the museum with your specific request.
Each of the two databases also contain the town and
area in which the person was born, as well as the page numbers on
which the individual biography can be found.
--THE YIZKOR BOOK PROJECT:
--The latest installment of the
Museum's Zambrow, Poland Yizkor Book translation is now
available for your perusal. This segment is especially interesting
because of the many aphorisms, or expressions in Yiddish that were
heard in Zambrow before the Second World War. Not only are these
sayings translated to English, but they are often explained.
All that is translated from this Yizkor Book can
only be found here at the Museum. It is hoped that the project will
be completed within a couple of years.
The link to the newest translated segment from the
Yizkor Book can be found by clicking
here. |