About The MIR Project

Czernowitzers et al:I have been in contact with Reeva Kimble the webmistress of the Mir Belarus website. I came across her site while looking for other Jewish genealogical sites. May I recommend you spend some time browsing this interesting website? Even though I have no genealogical connection to Mir, I find the Mir website fascinating, and very nicely constructed.Reeva is also managing the translation of the Mir Yizkor book into English. You can see from the index page that there is precious little translated. To get the flavour of this town and the gut wrenching events that were to be its fate, take a moment and read “MIR – BEFORE THE DESTRUCTION” and ” THE GERMAN OCCUPATION AND LIQUIDATION OF OUR LITTLE TOWN”.It’s not clear to me why the history of this town affected me so profoundly, but it did. And when you add the fact that the voices of the Yizkor book cannot be heard by those who do not read Hebrew, more’s the pity!Reeva and I discussed the difficulty she’s having in getting more of the book translated. There are still survivors in Israel in their 80′s or older. They have engaged in other memorial activities as you will see when you get to the website.And so, I wondered if among us, there were folks who could and would translate ‘small chunks’ of the Yizkor book of Mir? To this end, I have in the ‘Pages’ section of this blog, posted a ‘chunk’ of the text (six pages, one of which has already been translated) for you to look at. You can go there directly, by clicking HERE.I have no idea whether this is a hard or and easy job: I don’t know if the Hebrew is easy to read or not; if it will take a long time or a short time to do a chunk of this size. Reeva says she has folks who can check the historical names, and correct them.Given all that, if you have English/Hebrew skills and would like to take a look at the materials above we would appreciate hearing from you, even if it’s just about the level of difficulty of the ‘job’. Reeva is primarily interested in doing the the History chapters first, starting with the ‘History of the Jews of Mir’ by Dr. N.M. Gelber.It would certainly be considered a ‘mitzveh’ to have some help with this project!Thanks,jerome