Jewish Genealogical Society of Canada (Toronto)

Our local, national and international genealogical resources are valuable tools that enable our members to explore and research their family trees.  Please refer to the navigation bars on the left to choose various topics.

The Faces behind the Hands

The true resources of our Society are the many volunteers who have contributed hundreds of hours of their personal time without receiving a charitable donation receipt or even any hint of recognition. These volunteers are leaving a legacy of valuable information for their community and all the researchers around the world who are now able to view the results of their work on their computer screen.

On November 3, 2005, Adena Glasner performed as the hand model for her husband Harvey when she used white gloves to handle the fragile pages of the Rotenberg Ledger housed in the Ontario Jewish Archives, as Harvey photographed this data for our records.

Adena and Harvey Glasner They then transcribed each surname and indexed all the pages so they would be easy to search and retrieve. As a result, our Society has received requests from all over the world for information about relatives who emigrated to Toronto in the early part of the twentieth century.

In 2007, Arthur Ryman took the digital photographs and the spreadsheet index of the Rotenberg Ledger and, with some magical programming, made that information come alive on our website.

 This valuable resource would not be available to you without their dedicated efforts.

Arthur Ryman and Shelley Stillman For many years, Terri Rothman was the invisible webmistress behind our Society website as she quickly and accurately kept our announcements and calendar up-to-date. In 2008, our 8 year-old website was  transformed so that now we can more easily add new research, make it available to a wider audience, and give our members a password-protected space where they can safely share research information without being exposed to spam. During this transition, Arthur Ryman was the erudite technical guru guiding our efforts, and has graciously hosted the Website Committee while we all wrestled with Joomla.

We hope that more of our members will step forward to contribute their valuable skills and time to ensure the continued growth and success of our Society.