"More, Much More Than Fiddlers on the Roof!" by Brian Zakem

Program: Sunday, Oct. 27, 2013
Program starts 2:00 p.m

More, Much More Than Fiddlers on the Roof!

Genealogy researcher and writer Brian Zakem will present his program “More, Much More Than Fiddlers on the Roof!” at 2 p.m., Sunday, Oct. 27, 2013, at the Jewish Genealogical Society of Illinois meeting in Temple Beth Israel, 3601 W. Dempster St., Skokie.

Zakem says he will discuss the "significant twists and turns, ups and downs" of the Jewish community with their non-Jewish neighbors, in and around his ancestral towns of Ruzhany,  from the mid-1500s to the present.  This market town was first strongly rooted in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, then the Russian Empire and now Belarus.

Zakem, a mental health professional, has traced his own East European rabbinical family of origin over 19 generations back to the mid-1500s. He has conducted research and served as a volunteer coordinator for the Ruzhany, Belarus, yizkor book on JewishGen that can be read at jewishgen.org/yizkor/ruzhany/ruzhany.html.

The JGSI meeting facilities at Temple Beth Israel will open at 12:30 p.m. to accommodate members who want to use or borrow genealogy library materials, get help with genealogy websites on the Internet, or ask genealogical questions before the main program begins. For more information, visit http://jgsi.org/ or phone 312-666-0100.