Susan Weinberg to speak at Jewish Genealogical Society of Illinois meeting:

“A 3-D View of Immigration” will be the topic of a presentation by artist, author and genealogist Susan Weinberg at 7 p.m. Monday, May 6, 2019, at the Jewish Genealogical Society of Illinois meeting at Temple Beth-El, 3610 Dundee Road, Northbrook, Ill.

At this meeting, the JGSI genealogy help desk and research library will operate from 5:30 to 6:55 p.m. Member volunteers will access online databases and answer genealogical questions one-on-one for members and visitors as time allows. Books in the JGSI library, which has more than 800 volumes of interest to Jewish family historians, will be available for perusing. Many are available for borrowing by JGSI members for a limited time.

Susan Weinberg's talk “A 3-D View of Immigration” presents a perspective on immigration through the lens of laws, documents and family story. With a focus on the 1900s, she will examine the immigration laws that affected entry, immigration documents that were created with changes in the law and stories of Jews of the 1900s who came to America.

In addition to her work in the genealogy community, Weinberg is the author of “We Spoke Jewish: A Legacy in Story,” published by the Jewish Historical Society of the Upper Midwest. Based on interviews with elders from Sholom Home in Minnesota, the book contains stories gathered from Jews who grew up in early immigrant communities, Holocaust survivors who came in the 1940s and ’50s, and immigrants from the former Soviet Union who came in the 1970s through ’90s. Her presentation, using video clips from those interviews, will tell a lively story of Jewish immigration to the United States and the life of an immigrant juxtaposed with the documents and laws that framed that experience. 

This timely topic offers a perspective on immigration through the lens of family story while providing you with tools to explore your own family’s story.

Susan Weinberg is an artist, author and genealogist who focuses her work on family, cultural and community history. In all her pursuits her medium is story.

Her research has taken her to the Holocaust records of the International Tracing Service in Germany, to archives in Poland and Lithuania, and to shtetls and towns of Belarus, Ukraine and Poland where her family came from.  She created Kehilalink websites for JewishGen for ancestral towns in Belarus and Poland. Weinberg is a frequent public speaker and has presented at several IAJGS Jewish genealogy conferences. In Minnesota she serves on the board of the Minnesota Jewish Genealogical Society. As a genealogist, she does research for clients around the world.