|
My approach
Modelled after the
well-known American firms which specialize in historical research, this service
is nevertheless different to some extent in two aspects.
Firstly,
it is global in the meaning that it is not limited to one area but can usually
handle requests for research in various
locations, be it Israel, Eastern and Central Europe, the US, and more. This
approach seems to me to be of much importance because, possibly much more than
any other historical research, Jewish historical research calls for a world-wide
approach, which means retrieving and combining information from various sources
kept in various locations. This is because so many Jewish people moved from one
place to another throughout the last 150 years, because borders changed so much during that period in Central and
Eastern Europe, and because so much archival material was removed from its
original locations in the wake of the
Holocaust. Consequently one finds many French Jewish records in Moscow and New
York, important holdings pertaining to the Vienna Jewish community in
Jerusalem and much information on Jewish communities of what is today Ukraine,
in Warsaw. In most cases it is only by
combining resources from various locations that a full picture of the
researched topic can be recovered.
Secondly, it is comprehensive in the meaning that it
offers under one roof the entire
spectrum of historical and genealogical research, starting with research for
university faculty and ending with search for
missing heirs.
In order
to implement these ideas, there could
be no better place of work than Jerusalem. Here I have at my disposal the vast
collections and resources of Israeli archives and libraries and yet am only
three to four hours of flight away from Eastern and Central Europe. Because of the diversity of Israeli society
it is almost always possible to find
assistants for odd assignments like deciphering old letters written in
German in Hebrew characters, helping to understand the complexities of Jewish
vital statistics from Galicia, and even researching Ottoman records written in
Turkish in Arabic characters.
|