Schedule of Upcoming Events

Please note: Meeting times, dates, locations and speakers are subject to change.

Information is regularly updated. 

Our meetings will be in-person AND online whenever possible and safe, and for members who do not live near the Philadelphia area.

 

Our events are USUALLY scheduled on the same day and time each month, e.g., first Monday for Everything Genealogy. However, they might be moved to another week to work around Jewish or national holidays or other events. Our presentations/speakers may vary depending on the speaker’s availability. For the next several months, the schedule is:

  • April 2nd Board Meeting 7:30
  • April 7th Everything Genealogy 7:30
  • April 23rd Book Club Mazel, Rebecca Goldstein
  • April 27th JGASGP Monthly Meeting with Carol Moskot 2:00 MLR
  • May 5th Everything Genealogy 7:30
  • May 7th Board Meeting 7:30
  • May 18th JGASGP monthly meeting with Michelle Chubenko 2:00 MLR
  • May 28th Book Club    The Book Spy, by Alan Hlad   
  • June 2nd Everything Genealogy 7:30  
  • June 3rd Board Meeting 7:30
  • June 22nd JGASGP monthly meeting with David Lee Preston 2:00 MLR 
  • June 25th Book Club Florence Adler Swims Forever, Rachel Beanland 
  • July 7th  Everything Genealogy 7:30  
  • July 8th Board Meeting 7:30
  • July 13th JGASGP monthly meeting with Sunny Jane Morton Zoom only 

Sunday, April 27, 2025 at 2:30 pm

(2 pm for in-person Schmoozing and Mentoring)

Hybrid Meeting – In Person Venue at Main Line Reform, Orleans Room (downstairs)

 

Speaker: Carol Moskot, Award-Winning Publication Designer and Art Director and Child of Holocaust Survivors

Carol Moskot is an award-winning magazine art director, visual journalist and writer who resides in Montclair, New Jersey. Her article, The Five Postcards, the Holocaust story of her Grandfather, has been published in Canada and the United States. Find her work at www.carolmoskot.com.

 

Topic: The Last Letters: An Enthralling Investigation of a Jewish Family Devastated by the Holocaust and Partly Restored through the Power of Genealogy and Storytelling.

 

During Passover 2022, Carol Moskot receives an envelope from her mother, Agnes Moskot, containing five postcards. Written by Agnes’ father, László Braun, these were the last letters his wife, Elizabeth Braun, received from him during the Second World War.

 

Eighty years after they were written, and almost a year after receiving them, Carol uncovers what her grandmother could never share: the enduring love between two young Hungarian Jews caught in the turmoil of wartime Hungary. With the help of translators, a journalist, and others, she embarks on a quest to uncover her grandparents’ fate. What emerges is a poignant story and a genealogical journey that breaks the silence surrounding her family, her heritage, and herself. The survival of Carol’s grandmother and mother Thanks to the heroic actions of Swiss diplomat Carl Lutz, Carol’s grandmother and mother survived the Holocaust.

 

Sunday, May 18, 2025 at 2:30 pm

(2 pm for in-person Schmoozing and Mentoring)

Hybrid Meeting – In Person Venue at Main Line Reform, Hausen Auditorium

 

Speaker: Michelle Tucker Chubenko, Professional Genealogist, AG®, AGL™

Michelle is accredited in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States through the International Commission for the Accreditation of Professional Genealogists (ICAPGen) and specializes in the Mid-Atlantic region and Eastern European research. She has served as Program Chair for the Monmouth County Genealogy Society and Trustee with the Genealogical Society of New Jersey. Also, Michelle is a founding member with the “Nashi Predky/Our Ancestors” Family History Group at the Ukrainian History and Education Center (Somerset, New Jersey) and in 2023, coordinated the institute course Researching Your Ancestry in the Crownland of Galicia, Austria-Hungary. Since 2021, she has hosted a monthly Q&A Zoom session Have Questions? Get Answers for Research in Galicia.

 

Topic: Digging for Roots in the Garden State

Michelle will provide an introduction to many of New Jersey’s best reference materials for 19th-20th century genealogical research. Discover how to effectively locate vital records, probate records, and important websites that are useful for your research.

 

 

Sunday, June 22, 2025 at 2:30 pm

(2 pm for in-person Schmoozing and Mentoring)

Hybrid Meeting – In Person Venue at Main Line Reform, Hausen Auditorium

 

Speaker: David Lee Preston, Author and Journalist

David retired in 2020 as Justice and Injustice Editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer, where he was a finalist for the 1986 Pulitzer Prize in feature writing for “Journey To My Father’s Holocaust,” chronicling a monthlong trip with his father, George Preston, to Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and other places of his father’s past. His mother, Halina Wind Preston, a native of Turka-nad-Stryjem in the Carpathian foothills of Galicia, was one of 10 Jews who survived together for 14 months in the sewers of Lviv, saved by Polish Catholic sewer workers. His Mother’s Day 1983 article “A Bird in the Wind,” published five months after his mother’s death and praised by historian Michael Berenbaum as “the best article written on the life of a survivor,” was the first English-language presentation of the Lviv sewer survival story later dramatized by the Polish director Agnieszka Holland in her Oscar-nominated 2011 movie “In Darkness.” Halina Wind Preston became a Jewish educator and the first survivor of the Nazis to speak across the United States about her experiences, with 40 appearances in 30 cities from 1949 to 1953. Her son, born in 1955, visited her mountain town after the fall of the Soviet Union, and wrote about it in “Speaking for the Ghosts: A Story for My Mother,” the third article in his trilogy of cover stories about his parents in the Inquirer’s old Sunday magazine. He writes a newsletter about his parents that is archived on his website. His YouTube channel includes recorded book programs he hosts over Zoom for Sons & Daughters of Holocaust Survivors of Greater Philadelphia, founded in 1979. He lives in Center City Philadelphia with his wife, Ronda B. Goldfein, executive director of the AIDS Law Project of Pennsylvania. Their 1992 wedding was attended by millions who read about it – and about his mother – in the epilogue of James McBride’s international bestseller “The Color of Water.”

 

Topic: Finding Hope Underground

Nine years ago, emptying his childhood home in Wilmington, Delaware, the award-winning Philadelphia journalist David Lee Preston, a son of Holocaust survivors, got the biggest scoop of his career when he found an envelope marked by his mother in pencil Kanał (Polish for Sewer). Carefully he pulled out a tattered green handkerchief and four soiled notebooks filled with 167 pages in Polish written by his mother while she hid from the Nazis for 14 months in the sewers of Lviv in 1943-44. At this session, he will discuss his discovery and read passages of his mother’s original poetry and prose translated from those sewer notebooks.

 

Sunday, July 13, 2025 at 1:30 pm

(1 pm for Schmoozing and Mentoring)

Zoom Only Meeting

 

Speaker: Sunny Jane Morton, Family Tree Magazine, Contributing Editor

Sunny Jane Morton is a Contributing Editor at Family Tree Magazine and the Content Director at YourDNAGuide.com. She is past Editor of Ohio Genealogy News. She has twice received awards from the National Genealogical Society, most recently for her book How to Find Your Family History in U.S. Church Records, co-authored with Harold Henderson, CG.

 

Her other book, Story of My Life: A Workbook for Preserving Your Legacy, is now in its 2nd edition. She coordinated a course for the GRIP Genealogy Institute in 2024, and in 2025 will be an instructor for GRIP and the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy (SLIG).

 

Topic: Comparing the U.S. Newspaper Giants: What Jewish Content Do They Have?

 

Over a billion digitized newspaper pages are now searchable at online historical newspaper archives such as Chronicling America, Fulton History, GenealogyBank, Storied.com (formerly NewspaperArchive) and Newspapers.com. But which should you use? Is it worth subscribing to one of the premium sites?

 

Learn how they stack up for total amount of digitized content (including Jewish newspapers); geographic coverage; unique features and tools; and subscription options.

 

Learn how Goldie May can help you find newspaper collections across many websites. My tips, encouragement, and comparative analyses will help you more confidently choose and use newspaper websites

 

Sunday, September 14, 2025 at 2:30 pm

(2 pm for Schmoozing and Mentoring)

Hybrid Meeting – In Person Venue at Main Line Reform, Hausen Auditorium

 

The Steve Schecter Memorial Lecture

 

Speaker: Benjamin Nathans, Alan Charles Kors Associate Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania

Benjamin Nathans is the Alan Charles Kors Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania.  He teaches and writes about Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, modern European Jewish history, and the history of human rights. He is the author of the multiple award-winning book Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter With Late Imperial Russia.  His latest book, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement, tells the story of dissent in the USSR from Stalin’s death to the collapse of communism.  Nathans is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement.

 

Topic: Selective Integration: The Evolving Legal Status of Jews in Imperial Russia, 1795-1917

By the middle of the nineteenth century, more Jews lived in the Russian Empire than in any other country in the world. Eager to modernize their relatively backward agrarian kingdom, Russia’s rulers enacted a series of laws designed to integrate “useful” Jews, mimicking the results of emancipation in Western Europe without creating a society of equal citizens. Jewish elites played a surprisingly important role in this process, whose striking consequences became visible well before the revolution that swept away the empire itself.