Activities

International Conference of Washington.

Four Members of our Board took part this summer to the 31st International Conference on Jewish Genealogy at Washington (USA). Their report stresses the strong features of this event, which leads up to the 32nd Conference that the CGJ will organize in Paris in July 2012.

Families

Origins of the Wolf and Berr Orchel families and their inside family connections,

 Pascal FAUSTINI. A family, the Berr Orchel, has dominated the Jewish community of Nancy since its arrival in 1724, throughout all the 18th century. Pascal Faustini tries to determine its origin with the help of the published data bases and the recently published deciphering of the Hanau cemetery tombstones. His hypothesis is that the Orchel of Lorraine came from Frankfurt or from the neighbouring villages of Homburg and Niederursel.

The ancestry of Jean Zay (1904-1944), the well known French Minister of education during the Front Populaire.

Bernard LYON-CAEN. The paper presents, person by person, the ascendants of Jean ZAY (1904-1944),well known Minister of Education during the Front Populaire period,murdered by the Pétain police. On the paternal side the ancestors belong to the Jewish community of Metz, up to its founders in the 16th century. On the maternal side, the ancestors are protestant villagers from the Beauce region near Paris, who had no records before the French Revolution and therefore are only known from the end of the 18th century.

Looking for two rabbis at the Grand Sanhédrin and Assemblée des Notables.

Georges HALBRONN. Georges Halbronn uses the very fine recent publications describing the alsatian cemeteries of Wintzenheim and Rosenwiller to identify two rabbis who represented, one the Haut-Rhin, the other the Bas-Rhin communities at the meeting in Paris in 1807 of Napoleon’s Grand Sanhédrin devoted to the search of the role of the French Jewish community.

Library  

List of recently received documents and books 

Press and Books review

Questions and Answers