'Wandering Jews' get a 'Geni' map

Jewish memorial tree, Budapest, Hungary
(Photo credit)

Blogger Brian Blum is touting a new web-based genealogy app: Geni:

Every time you add a name, you can include an email address. Geni then sends a message inviting that person to join your tree and start entering data of his or her own. In that way, your family tree grows as other people do the heavy lifting. Geni sends out an email summary of every week of who's joined and allows you to enter missing addresses directly into the email.

To give you an example, I started by entering 21 names into Geni. I knew the email addresses of 15 of those people and they were automatically invited, a number of whom immediately began filling in their part of the tree. After about 3 weeks of using Geni, there are now 472 people in my tree dating as far back as the 1850s – to my great-great grandfather who lived in Berlad Romania – and as far a field as my aunt's ex-husband's sister's family. That comes out to 115 blood relatives and 356 in-laws.

Worth a visit and sign-up, I'd say.

More Jewish genealogy resources are here.

Virginia Tech slayings: A fitting Jewish response

In a response to the appalling Virginia Tech slayings, Chabad on Campus has set up the Hearts to Hokies campaign:

A National Week of Goodness and Kindness

Join the "Hearts to Hokies" campaign to spread the light of goodness and kindness in the world. Add an extra good deed, whatever it may be, in memory of the victims.

The deeds will be collected from campuses and communities across the nation and presented to the Virginia Tech community, as a tangible expression of our love and concern and our dedication to making the world a better place.

Go there now, sign in and do this.

Here is the condolence page for Liviu Librescu, the 75-year old Romanian-Israeli Holocaust survivor who was slain in a true act of Kiddush Hashem - sanctifying God's Name - as he heroically defended his students from the killer.

More on Librescu here.

Seeing terrorism against civilians - from the inside out

From the very impressive site (and turn on your speakers):

The purpose of terrorism is to create victims. The goal is to murder and maim as many innocent people as possible. It is a political tool that has worldwide appeal, because it works. We have allowed it to work by not condemning and isolating those who use it. Terrorism has destroyed thousands of innocent lives in the past six years alone. Civilized people everywhere must condemn terrorism. We must speak in one voice. There is no excuse for terrorism - ever.

They represent a broad cross-section of humanity.

They are commuters on the London subway system. And on the trains in Madrid. They are celebrants at a wedding in Amman, Jordan and at a bat mitzvah in Hadera, Israel. They are little kids eating pizza; they are tourists in Bali and Egypt. They are people praying in churches and mosques and synagogues. They are celebrating the Passover Seder.

Even doctors who try to help can become victims. In September of 2003, Dr. David Applebaum, the head of the ER deparment at Shaare Zedek Medical Center was murdered along with his 20 year old daughter, Naava. They were in Café Hillel in Jerusalem.

(I wrote about this particular terror attack from a personal, painful POV here).

Stunning Hebrew Calligraphy

Beautiful, haunting images. Go and look.