I went to an interesting lecture about Halacha and Ethics presented by Rony Golan. It was interesting to hear a different perspective about keeping unsavory information from clients, not because you think they might not want to know about the scandal, but because the wrong kind of scandal can essentially curse a Jewish family for generations because of one person’s actions. Although he presented a couple of cases, he didn’t give answers.

The Poland track was in the afternoon. Yale Reisner spoke about the Applied Science, which he described (I’m paraphrasing here) as the part of the research that affects the living. He told stories of people contacting the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw thinking they were the only survivors, and discovering they weren’t.

Other sessions were very beginner level, so my interest waned.

The Bessarabia SIG meeting was later and listening to a long lecture about all the projects didn’t interest me, so I left early. I was practically greeted outside the door by a DNA cousin  – he wasn’t going anywhere, just randomly wandering. He is one of my two close matches, second or third cousin (we can’t find the connection) and we hung out the rest of the night.

Heading to dinner, we picked up a couple more people and had good company for dinner, the klezmer music, and “drinks” until the morning.