Israel: Jewish Names Conference, August 2009

The Ninth International Conference On Jewish Names will be held as part of The Fifteenth World Congress of Jewish Studies, August 2-6, 2009, at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

The names conference is organised by Bar Ilan University’s Prof. Aaron Demsky, of the Department of Jewish History Project for the Study of Jewish Names Faculty of Jewish Studies.

A call for papers in Hebrew or English closes June 15, 2008. For more details, click here.

The 2009 event has five divisions: The Bible and Its World;History of the Jewish People; Rabbinic Literature and Jewish Law and Jewish Thought; Languages, Literatures, and Arts; and Contemporary Jewish Society.

The last conference covered these fields of Jewish studies, including:
Archives, Art, Jewish Women Creativity and Learning, Contemporary Jewish Society, Demography, Folklore, Hebrew Language, History – Antiquity, History – Middle Ages, History – New era, Holcaust Studies. Jewish Education, Jewish Law, Jewish Music, Jewish Names, Jewish Thought, Ladino, Languages, Litereatures and Arts, Medieval Literature, New Hebrew Literature, Rabbinic Literature, Sociology, Talmud, The 19th Congress of Masoretic Studies, The Bible and Its World, The Historical Society of Israel, Theatre, Yiddish, and Zionism

Here are some examples of programs presented at the 14th Congress (see more, including the abstracts, here):

Jewish Names in Bialystok – Zofia Abramowicz

Hebrew Names in the Speech of Georgian Jews – Ruven Enoch

“Perlstecker” and “Golgstecker”: Some Specialist Surnames in Tailoring – Bracha Yaniv

The Days of the Week As Jewish Surnames – Michael Falk

Name Changes During the British Mandate – Jean-Pierre Stroweis

Social Stratification and Topography According to the Names Contained in the Register of the Jewish Community of Rome – Yaakov Lattes

Double Given-Names Among Ashkenazic Jewry – Yosef Rivlin

From “Judaismo” to “Sefardismo”: Dialectics of Fear in Northern Mexico – Schulamith C. Halevy

Yiddish Folksongs of Religious and National Content from the Collections of the Vernadsky Library in Kiev – Lyudmila Sholokhova

Sephardic Influences in the Liturgy of the Ashkenazi Orthodox Jews of London – Naomi Cohen Zentner

Jewish Personal Names in Fatimid Egypt During the 11th Century – Elinoar Bareket

Geographic Names in Jewish Sources from the Period of the Crusades – Israel Rozenson

Occupations of Bukharan Jews at the End of the 19th Century (Based on Nicknames and Family Names)- Chana Tolmas

Daily Life of Jewish Women in Ottoman Jerusalem During the 19th Century – Yaron Ben Naeh

In Search of Our Lost Spain and Other Sephardic Reflections – Ruth Baher

Engraved in Stone: The Female Voice on the Tombstones of Jewish Cemeteries in Istanbul and Salonika – Gila Hadar

The Immigration of Ladino Speaking Jews from the Ottman Empire to New York in the Early 20th Century – Daniel Florentin

This is only a very small portion of interesting programs. The breadth and depth of this conference should provide food for thought for the program committees of upcoming international conferences on Jewish genealogy.

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New York: The German Stammtisch

For more than 60 years, a German-speaking group has gathered on Wednesdays in New York City to maintain their ties to German culture. The gathering brings together artistic, literary and intellectual types – Jewish and not.

The Forward’s story on “The Longest Running Salon, Still Going Strong,” is by Marjorie Backman.

In 1943, two refugees from Nazi regimes — dissident writer Oscar Maria Graf from Germany and his Viennese Jewish friend George Harry Asher — bumped into each other and dined at a German restaurant in Manhattan. They decided to meet weekly, in the style of a Stammtisch, the German and Austrian custom of gathering a group regularly at a certain table in a restaurant, coffeehouse or bar.

“These were people who refused to let Hitler take their language away,” said Janet Gerson, a member of the group.

Graf, a Bavarian Catholic, had famously complained to the Nazis during the book burnings that the authorities should burn his works, too. After he was put on a list of intellectuals to be rescued, Graf arranged the same for Asher.

The group met at several Manhattan restaurants, then at Asher’s home and then at the small Yorkville apartment of German Jewish émigré and former jewelry designer Gabrielle Glueckselig.

The group – numbering 9-30 – meets weekly; each brings a supper dish to share or pastries. At the ringing of a bell, newcomers introduce themselves and everyone discusses a topic.

Wiesbaden, Germany invited Glueckselig to return to her hometown to receive a medal for tracing her Jewish family history of gold- and silversmiths back to the 17th century. “Wiesbaden tried to make up for what the Nazis did,” Glueckselig said. Since she couldn’t travel, the town came to her, filling the residence of New York’s German consul with the Stammtisch in attendance. This spring, Glueckselig again celebrated with the Stammtisch, marking her 94th birthday.

The founders – Asher and Graf – are dead. Only Glueckselig is left from the early days. As members aged in the 1980s-90s, younger visitors appeared (writers, journalists, scholars).

In 1995, Yoash Tatari, an Iranian exile working for Cologne television, was so intrigued to discover World War II-era immigrants speaking German in New York that he created a film, “Glueckselig in New York. Der Stammtisch der Emigranten.”

Over the past decade, Austrians and Germans have discovered the group; some are in New York to perform alternative military service. Since 1991, the Gedenkdienst project, or the Austrian Holocaust Memorial Service, has sent Austrians to help preserve Holocaust history. Some work at New York’s Leo Baeck Institute, which documents German Jewish history, while others in the German program work at Washington Heights’ Isabella Geriatric Center, where some survivors live.

The elders of the group befriend the young foreigners, forming an island of intergenerational friendship.

“I would never have a chance to meet a 20-year-old from Austria or Germany,” said member Trudy Jeremias, 82, a jewelry designer. “Here there’s no age gap. We’re all friends.” Jeremias escaped to the United States from Vienna after Kristallnacht when her grandfather, a banker, was able to obtain affidavits for visas.

Other regulars include retired teacher and Theresienstadt survivor Miriam Merzbacher, 81, who attended religious school in Amsterdam with Anne Frank. Hilde Olsen was deported to Poland from Berlin, served as an industrialist’s secretary, typed a list of Jews, added her name. She was on Schindler’s List and could join the group. Kurt Sonnenfeld, 82, a Jewish refugee from Vienna fled on foot through Switzerland and France and became a social worker in New York.

Read more here.