Sunday 20 January 2008

My PhD

my PhD is about 'Jewish Immigration to Scotland and transmission of Jewish culture through 5 generations'. It's an oral history of one extended family, to which I'm distantly related by marriage. The Rev Zvi David and his wife Sophia Hoppenstein came to Edinburgh in 1882 and had nine children. Five of those children had children themselves; and I'm interviewing as many of those surviving children - now in their seventies and eighties - and their children and grandchildren; to find out about what's survived from the Hoppenstein's orthodox Jewish culture; what's changed; and what's new in their religious and cultural lives. I'm interested in the influences on their lives from education (secular and religious), from their parents and from British society 'out there'. I'm putting this on my blog so that I can add the Hoppenstein family tree - which is as complete as I think I can make it - and so that my 'informants' - ie the people I'm interviewing - can get easy access to it.

I can email you a family tree - I had put it on here but it's searchable on Google so I didn't really want all this personal information 'out there' in the public domain.