April 6, 2008:
Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society—History in the Making
 Guest Speaker: Valery Bazarov, Director, HIAS Location and Family History Service
For more than 125 years, HIAS has been in the center of Jewish immigration, and now its archive is a collective memory of 4.5 million Jews who found safe haven under HIAS auspices. Depending on the year of arrival, a different amount of information could be discovered in the records—from a short arrival card to a complete file containing a wealth of data highlighting the difficulties an immigrant or a family of immigrants should overcome to get to the Goldene Medina (Golden Country).
The HIAS history will be shown through the contents of archives from the beginning of the 20th century through the Holocaust years and after the war period. The audience will hear about rescue operations HIAS ran in occupied Poland, Czechoslovakia and France, the work in the DP camps, saving the Jews from the Arab countries, during the Hungarian and Cuban crises and of course about the project Let My People Go, which resulted in bringing more than 400,000 Russian Jews from the former Soviet Union. The PowerPoint presentation will illustrate the case studies of different periods of immigration.
Read more at Schelly Talalay Dardashti's blog:
http://tracingthetribe.blogspot.com/2008/03/michigan-hias-valery-bazarov-april-6.html
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