IGRA values the many hours of dedicated work by those who volunteer their time to help with our various projects. If you are not yet an active volunteer we have many opportunities that may interest you – building our databases, helping document cemeteries, oral history projects, informal help sessions over coffee, giving assistance in the Genealogy Help Center at the National Library of Israel and others. Please send us an e-mail and let us know what area you are interested in!
We have instituted The Mathilde Tagger Award of Recognition for Volunteering with the IGRA Databases which is awarded every year to chosen volunteers among the many that donated their time and effort to build databases dealing with Eretz Israel. Award recipients receive a year membership to the Israel Genealogy Research Association.
Mathilde Tagger has been deeply involved in Jewish genealogy both in Israel and abroad for the last twenty years, especially in the field of Sephardic genealogy. Mathilde has published numerous articles in various Jewish genealogical journals and was co-author of “Guidebook for Sephardic and Oriental Genealogical Sources in Israel”, Avotaynu, 2006. She has built and published many databases, available on http://www.sephardicgen.com. She was very active for many years in the IGS and she served as their Sephardic SIG Coordinator. Mathilde was the Project Coordinator and member of the Jerusalem 2004 Jewish International Conference Board. In 2007 she received the Life Achievement Award at the IAJGS conference. Since 2008 she has been the head of the digitization team for the Montefiore Census. Mathilde has been a source of inspiration to all of us involved in preparing databases. We thank her and know that without her pioneering efforts we could not have reached this stage today.
We are pleased to announce that Tzameret-Rivka Avivi and Arieh Rochman-Halperin are this years recipients.
