Center for Jewish History and Routes to Roots Foundation Expand Online Access to Family History Research

NEW YORK, April 18, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- The Center for Jewish History, one of the world's foremost Jewish research and cultural institutions, has announced a cooperative agreement between the Center and The Miriam Weiner Routes to Roots Foundation (RTRF). 

The new collaboration brings together some of the world's most comprehensive databases for researching Jewish genealogy. The Center will incorporate RTRF's Eastern European Archival Database and Image Database into its online catalog, vastly expanding access to a wealth of genealogical resources relating to Jewish and civil records from Belarus, Lithuania, Moldova, Poland and Ukraine. Select archive data has also been added to the database from Russia and Romania. Coupled with the vast trove of the Center's partner collections, researchers will soon be able to gain enhanced free access to some of the most comprehensive family history research tools anywhere in the world.

As part of this new relationship, Ms. Weiner, a premier Jewish genealogist, will serve as senior advisor for genealogy services in the Ackman & Ziff Family Genealogy Institute at the Center.  Users will be able to access RTRF through www.cjh.org and at www.rtrfoundation.org. 

"The Center is proud to work with Miriam Weiner and the Routes to Roots Foundation," says Michael S. Glickman, the Center's chief operating officer. "This initiative is at the core of our mission to ensure greater access to the materials of the Jewish people and to create a lasting legacy of our partners' holdings for scholars, students and the general public."

The Ackman & Ziff Family Genealogy Institute, the largest Jewish family history research institute in the United States, provides an enormous wealth of resources six days a week for lay investigators and seasoned researchers. The five partners of the Center—American Jewish Historical Society, American Sephardi Federation, Leo Baeck Institute, Yeshiva University Museum and YIVO Institute for Jewish Research—hold collections that total more than 500,000 volumes and 100 million archival documents, including tens of thousands of textiles, ritual objects, recordings, films, photographs, and works of art. Taken as a whole, the collections represent the world's largest repository of the modern Jewish experience.

The Routes to Roots Foundation was established in 1994 with the goal to survey, study, research, inventory and document Jewish material, archives and Judaica in Eastern European archives. RTRF has expanded its goals to include an extensive image collection, numerous articles by historians and archivists and updated archival data, all accessible on the RTRF website without cost to the user.  Miriam Weiner is an author, lecturer and columnist. Weiner is a recognized expert in the field of genealogy and Holocaust research and she has been awarded the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies (IAJGS) prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award.  Weiner's two award-winning books: Jewish Roots in Poland and Jewish Roots in Ukraine and Moldova remain authoritative in the field. 

For media inquiries, please contact Lisa F. Roth, the Center's director of institutional advancement, at lroth@cjh.org or 212-294-8307.

SOURCE The Center for Jewish History