JRI-Poland

Finding Your Family's Hometown: A Guide for the Perplexed
2025-11-16 12:00 - 13:30 (America/New_York) | https://www.jri-poland.org/event/5664/
We realize that our website supposes that you have a good idea of the town(s) that your family came from – but what if you don’t?
Join us either Thursday, November 13th at 8 pm Eastern or Sunday, November 16th at 12 pm Eastern for a 90-minute interactive discussion with JRI-Poland president, Robinn Magid, focusing on Finding Your Family’s Hometown. The two sessions have different sign ups. You are welcome to attend either or both.
This is the signup for the Sunday, November 16th event.
We receive a fair number of questions from people who:

Only know that their family came from “Russia”, “Austria” or “Russian Poland”;
Cannot find “their town” on a map;
Think that the town “no longer exists”;
Are unsure why they cannot find their family name in the town they expect;
Have never found a family document in the JRI-Poland database.

If any of these cases describe you, please join us and we’ll do our best to help each other!
Please note that participants in this session must be dues-paying members of JRI-Poland. You can check your membership status by logging into the JRI-Poland.org website and checking the status bubble just under the “HELLO” message at the top of your screen. Hovering over the “HELLO” message will invoke a drop-down menu with the option called “MY PROFILE” where you can join if you have not yet by paying $54 annual dues.

Lublin-Zamość Area Town Hall Meeting
2026-02-08 13:00 - 14:30
If you are researching the towns and villages of the Lublin-Zamość Area, you are cordially invited to attend a 90-minute Town Hall style meeting on Sunday, February 8, 2026 beginning at 1 pm Eastern. You must have a JRI-Poland NextGen account to attend, but for this particular session, you do not need to be a JRI-Poland annual member.
The Lublin-Zamość area was the most densely, Jewishly populated area in Poland and comprised some of the oldest Jewish communities there. The JRI-Poland database includes data from more than 100 towns and villages where Jews lived. The descendents of the Jews of this area include family traditions of descending from both Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jewish families, including Jews who fled the Spanish Inquisition to Italy, and then were invited in to the area by Count Jan Zamoyski around 1535.
This session will be led by Robinn Magid, Lublin Area Coordinator, and Shelley Pollero, Zamość Area Coordinator. Robinn and Shelley have led joint Lublin-Zamość area meetings at more than 20 of the annual IAJGS conferences. Together they bring decades of experience with the Jewish records of the local towns and they have each visited many of them in person.
The session will include a presentation about the region and the research opportunities in the Lublin-Zamość area. We will include a breakout session into smaller groups by towns of interest, and then will regroup for a Q&A session to develop an understand of what your priorities seem to be as we plan for the next projects that JRI-Poland will address in this document-rich area.
Join us!
Image Attribution: By SANtosito – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=95970545
