Salt Lake City is hosting Jewish genealogy conference

For a culture that holds family in high esteem, asking about family history can be a sore spot for many Jews whose families suffered through or perished in the Holocaust.

Yet hundreds of Jewish ancestry buffs will converge on Salt Lake City this weekend for the 27th International Conference on Jewish Genealogy. The event will feature several speakers seeking to dispel the notion that European Jews can't trace their ancestry because all the records of their heritage were destroyed by the Nazis.

For many years after the war, "If you ask some Jews about their ancestry, they would say everyone died and the records were burned because they didn't want to deal with it," said Robert Neu, president of the Utah Jewish Genealogical Society, which he helped organize about five years ago.

"Some of those people believe what they said. There are records available and some are not, but that's true whether you're Jewish or not."

Paul Shapiro, director of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, will tell attendees about efforts to open previously inaccessible records to researchers and answer questions most frequently asked by those who believed their family history had disappeared.

The six-day conference, which begins Sunday at the Hilton City Center, is also held, in part, to help Jews connect with others who are seeking information about their family heritage, with small group meetings organized by geographic region in addition to educational sessions on topics such as DNA testing, database searching and photo archiving.

The conference also features a series of documentary films about Jewish history and a photo exhibit about life in a small pre-war Russian/Polish town.

For Utahns whose only flashpoint for Jewish family history is a vague remembrance that there has been anger at the LDS Church's posthumous baptism of Holocaust victims, the conference in Salt Lake City may signal an understanding that the interest in family history goes beyond the headlines.

The frustration some have expressed over the baptisms "is an issue that's probably not unique to Jews," Neu said, though "it may be a little more sensitive than to other groups. There are people who care and those who don't, just like there are those who believe in the hereafter and those who don't."