Sallyann Amdur Sack-Pikus is a past president of IAJGS and a recipient of its Lifetime Achievement Award. She is co-owner, founder (with Gary Mokotoff) and editor of the Avotaynu, the International Review of Jewish Genealogy.

Sack-Pikus is a member of the board and founding chairman of the International Institute for Jewish Genealogy in Jerusalem. In 1980, she founded the Jewish Genealogy Society of Greater Washington and served as its first president.

Sack-Pikus has co-chaired seven IAJGS conferences and has authored or co-authored many books on Jewish genealogy, including Where Once We Walked and the Avotaynu Guide to Jewish Genealogy.

“Converso Genealogy Project: Tracking the Diaspora of the Iberian Forced Converts” (Tues-167), 7:30-9:30 P.M.

The objective of The “Converso Genealogy Project” (a multi-tiered project) is to consolidate the work that has been done on large segments of Spanish and Portuguese Jewish populations who were converted to Catholicism during the 15th century. Some people fled and joined Jewish communities in the East and others established communities in Western Europe and in the New World.  Many were lost to recorded history.

The project will  garner information on the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish Diaspora as well as genealogical information matching  contemporary descendants to their forced-convert ancestors.

The project intends to compile in one place, information that has been scattered in multiple sources, languages, repositories and countries throughout the world for centuries. It will find a home for all the work that historians, researchers and serious genealogists have done. Aside from the obvious contribution to Jewish genealogy, this will equip historians with data enabling them to rewrite entire chapters of Jewish history.

[Presented with Abraham Gross, Sallyann Sack-Pikus, and Brooke Ganz]