17
Jun
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Date/Time
Date(s) - August 27, 2023
1:30 pm - 3:30 pm
Speaker
Hal Bookbinder
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JGSLA’s next meeting– Live & Zoom
Beth Chayim Chadashim Synagogue
6090 West Pico Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90035
The entrance to the synagogue is from the alley behind the building.
Ring the buzzer on the parking lot gate.*
There will be informal mentoring at the Schmooze Table at 1:00 p.m. prior to the start of the meeting.
Coffee and tea will be available.
Hal Bookbinder: A Murder in Boston’s West End:
Click here to view the recorded meeting
from Sunday, August 27, 2023 @1:30
Program Description
In researching my family, I was surprised to find a relative in the Massachusetts State Penitentiary in 1910. Archival newspapers revealed an unknown marriage, a child, infidelity, murder, attempted suicide, and divorce. Upon his guilty plea, Louis Tennis was sentenced to 11 to 20 years. Yet, after just five, at the behest of the warden and the warden’s wife, the governor pardoned him. He proceeded to lead a nondescript life as a dressmaker, husband and father and his notorious past disappeared into the mist. My research included locating and obtaining 115-year-old court documents containing a revealing plea for leniency penned by the prison’s Jewish chaplain. The story has some intriguing twists and odd coincidences both before and after the murder in Boston’s West End.
In researching my family, I was surprised to find a relative in the Massachusetts State Penitentiary in 1910. Archival newspapers revealed an unknown marriage, a child, infidelity, murder, attempted suicide, and divorce. Upon his guilty plea, Louis Tennis was sentenced to 11 to 20 years. Yet, after just five, at the behest of the warden and the warden’s wife, the governor pardoned him. He proceeded to lead a nondescript life as a dressmaker, husband and father and his notorious past disappeared into the mist. My research included locating and obtaining 115-year-old court documents containing a revealing plea for leniency penned by the prison’s Jewish chaplain. The story has some intriguing twists and odd coincidences both before and after the murder in Boston’s West End.
BiographyHal is a retired information systems professional who continues to instruct at the university level. He has been actively researching his genealogy for more than three decades, identifying over 4,000 relatives and tracing two lines to the mid-1700s in modern Ukraine. He is a past president of the JGS of Los Angeles and of the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies. Hal publishes a series of monthly articles on safe computing which are freely available at http://www.tinyurl.com/SafeComputingArticles. He and his wife, Marci, were raised in the Catskills of New York State, in the famed “Borsht Belt”. After attending New York University and a four-year stint in the US Air Force, they have lived in the Los Angeles area. In 2018, he made a journey to Ukraine, visiting various areas of the former Volhynia and Podolia in which his family lived for hundreds of years
JGSLA MEMBERS FREE – $5 FOR GUESTS, ALL ARE WELCOME, please share the ZOOM link with folks you know.
*There is ample free street parking on Sunday on surrounding streets. Limited handicap parking is available in the rear of the synagogue. If you need to park in the synagogue parking lot, please let us know RSVP. The entrance to the synagogue is from the alley behind the building. Ring the buzzer on the parking lot gate.