SFBAJGS - Calendar of Genealogical Events

Past Programs

Wednesday, September 9, 2026 SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM Free and everyone interested is welcome. co-sponsored with Jewish Community Library Time and Place: 6:30 pm until 7:30 pm, Pacific Time At Your Home Topic: The Empty Envelope: Family Secrets and a Grandfather’s Legacy Speaker: Rhona S. Weinstein and Harvey M. Weinstein In 1921 Vienna, Eisig Lubetzky—a gifted Jewish writer, critic, and former child prodigy—died by suicide, leaving behind a wife, three children, and a silence so profound it shaped generations. Nearly a century later, his psychologist granddaughter and her psychiatrist husband set out to uncover the truth of who he was and why his life ended so abruptly. What begins as a search for a man becomes an intimate reckoning with the legacy he left behind. The Empty Envelope: Family Secrets and a Grandfather’s Legacy is a riveting blend of mystery, biography, and memoir, charting an almost 30-year investigation across continents, languages, and historical upheavals. Drawing from forgotten manuscripts, family stories, and newly translated writings, the authors reveal a polymath whose soaring early promise was undone by poverty, discrimination, mental illness, and the shifting currents of Jewish life in early twentieth-century Europe. As Eisig’s story comes into focus, so too do the psychological aftershocks that rippled through his family: the stigma of suicide, the burdens of a concealed past, and the unspoken pact that shaped the lives of his wife and children. For his granddaughter, the biography becomes a mirror—illuminating her own fractured relationship with her mother and the intergenerational transmission of trauma, resilience, and hope. Spanning more than 100 years and moving from a Belarussian shtetl to Vienna, Montreal, and the San Francisco Bay Area, The Empty Envelope is at once a historical excavation and a deeply personal odyssey. It speaks to anyone who has searched their family tree for missing branches, confronted inherited silences, or grappled with the ways that history lives on within us. In bringing one man’s forgotten life to light, the authors show how understanding the past can transform the present—and open the door to reconciliation. Rhona S. Weinstein, a professor of psychology emerita at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of the award-winning book Reaching Higher: The Power of Expectations in Schooling (Harvard University Press), and co-editor of Achieving College Dreams (Oxford University Press). Harvey M. Weinstein, psychiatrist and human rights scholar, is a Senior Research Fellow at the Human Rights Center and a retired Clinical Professor in the School of Public Health, UC Berkeley. He is the author of Psychiatry and The CIA: Victims of Mind Control (American Psychiatric Press) and co-editor of My Neighbor, My Enemy: Justice and Community After Mass Atrocity (Cambridge University Press). This program is made possible by Larry Burgheimer. Register for this meeting. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Monday, September 28, 2026 SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM Free and everyone interested is welcome. Time and Place: 4:30 pm until 6:00 pm, Pacific Time At Your Home Topic: Bringing Jewish History Back to Birzai Speaker: Jonathan Dorfan Ninety five percent of the Jews of Lithuania were murdered in the Holocaust. But in Birzai, they will be remembered, and the Holocaust documented. Jonathan Dorfan, who can trace his ancestry in Birzai back to 1720, and a group of descendants worked with the townspeople to create a memorial to the people, and to the dark history of the years of the Holocaust that must not be forgotten. Mr. Dorfan will cover the origins, design, planning and realization of the Memorial and, likewise, the Holocaust Exhibit. He will also show a powerful video documenting the 2019 dedication of the Memorial. Jonathan Dorfan was born in Cape Town, South Africa. He began researching his family roots in the early 1990s. His paternal origins date back to the early 1700s in Birzai and Panevezys, Lithuania. While many Dorfan families emigrated in the period 1890-1910, those that did not fell victim to the brutal murders of the Lithuanian Holocaust. Jonathan has been centrally involved with realizing both the Memorial to the 2400 Jews murdered in Birzai on August 8, 1941 and the standing Holocaust Exhibit that recently opened in the Birzai Regional Museum. From 1976 to 2010, Jonathan worked as an experimental particle physicist at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, including serving as its third Director. From 2010-2017, he was the inaugural President and CEO of OIST Graduate University, in Okinawa, Japan. Register for this meeting. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. You do not have to have a Zoom account to attend a Zoom meeting. You will be prompted to download the software, once you have clicked on the link that you have been provided. You may also wish to create an account, but that is not required to participate in a Zoom meeting.

Que sera sera

 

Wednesday, September 9, 2026 SFBAJGS Presentation ZOOM Free and everyone interested is welcome. co-sponsored with Jewish Community Library