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Dear JewishGen Community,

I am pleased to announce that beta testing of our new JewishGen
Discussion Group platform has ended, and we are planning to go live
this Thursday, October 10, 2019.

As discussed in the past (most recently at the 2019 JewishGen Annual
Meeting), our current/old Discussion List platform is woefully
antiquated. Among its many challenges: it is not secure, it requires
messages to be sent in Plain Text, does not support accented
characters or languages other than English, cannot display links or
images, and is not mobile-friendly.

This new platform that JewishGen will begin using on Thursday is a
scalable, and sustainable solution and allows us to engage with
JewishGen members throughout the world! Here are some of the features
you will be able to enjoy and experience:

- A simple, secure, and intuitive interface that is mobile friendly.
- In addition to English, you can post messages in other languages
- Messages can have attachments, and display hyperlinks, photos, and images
- You can include formatted (bold, italic, underlined, accented) characters

All subscribers to this JewishGen Discussion Group will be
automatically migrated over to the new platform this Thursday. No
individual action needs to be taken! (To start, we are upgrading only
the main JewishGen Discussion Group. In the near future, we will focus
on upgrading the Discussion Groups of various JewishGen areas and
projects).

For additional details about this exciting upgrade, we have created a
Member Guide which can be accessed by clicking here: http://bit.ly/JGMemberGuide.

This change comes as a result of our strategic plan to modernize our
systems and to make JewishGen more robust, sustainable, and easier to
use, and I would like to thank everyone who has played such an
integral role in getting us to this point.

Specifically, I would like to publicly express our appreciation and
gratitude to Dr. Richard (Dick) Plotz, who has managed JewishGen's
varied Discussion Lists for more than two decades, and to the entire
current team of moderators (who we don't properly thank enough) for
all of their time and devotion to managing our lists. They literally
have kept this going for many years, and I am sure that without their
help, our Discussion Lists would have stopped years ago. More about
Dick's indefatigable service to JewishGen will be distributed in the
coming weeks.

If you have any questions in the meantime, please email support@JewishGen.org. Wishing all a meaningful Yom Kippur.

Avraham Groll
Executive Director
JewishGen.org
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