All About Jewish Theatre - YIVO-ASF Lecture“Discovering Salonika, the Jerusalem of the Balkans "Tuesday, August 23, 2005

YIVO-ASF Lecture titled “Discovering Salonika, the Jerusalem of the Balkans:Perspectives and Insights Gleaned from the YIVO Archives” will take place at the Center for Jewish History on Tuesday, August 23, 2005 at 7 pm. Refreshments will be served from 6:30 to 7:00.

Sponsored by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the American Sephardi Federation with Sephardic House, the lecture will be given by Devin Naar, Project Historian of the Archive of the Jewish Community of Salonika housed in the YIVO Archives. Mr. Naar has been accepted into the Doctoral Program in Jewish History at Stanford University and is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship for study in Greece.

The Salonika Project at YIVO, whose objective is to catalog, microfilm and digitize the Records of the Jewish Community of Salonika in the YIVO Archives, is funded by the Maurice Amado Foundation and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The American Sephardi Federation also provides bibliographic resources and intellectual support. An Academic Advisory Committee, consisting of leading scholars of Sephardic and Greek Jewry, has been formed to provide guidance to project staff.

The YIVO Salonika Collection holds fragments of the Records of the Jewish Communal Council of Salonika, primarily for the interwar period, including three of the multi volume population registers created after the Great Fire of 1917 to assess the membership of the Jewish community as well as damages incurred by them. The population registers continued to be updated throughout the interwar period and include entries for births, marriages and other life cycle events. The majority of the Jewish community of Salonika was killed in Auschwitz in 1943.

The documents in the collection are in Ladino, Hebrew and Greek. A large proportion of them are written in 'solitreo', the handwritten Ladino script. A smaller proportion of the documents are in Greek.

The lecture will be accompanied by a Powerpoint demonstration with samples of documents from the collection.

As seating is limited advance registration is required. To make a reservation please call 212-294-6143 or email fmohrer@yivo.cjh.org .

We hope that you will honor us with your presence at this lecture.

Sincerely yours,

Fruma Mohrer
Chief Archivist
YIVO Institute for Jewish Research
15 West 16th Street
New York, NY 10011
212-294-6143
fax: 212-292-1892