Wednesday, February 13, 2019

Know Any Jewish Civil War Soldiers?


[We received this email about a Civil War demographic not usually mentioned. Pertain to your family?]
Good Morning,

        My name is Eliza Kolander, and I am writing to you on behalf of the Shapell Manuscript Foundation, with regards to our Roster Project, a comprehensive database of Jewish-American soldiers and sailors who fought in the Civil War for both the Union and the Confederacy. Our starting point was Simon Wolf’s 1895 The American Jew as Patriot, Soldier and Citizen, and over the last decade, we’ve verified the names he included as Jewish or not, identified their accurate military service, and added more than a thousand soldiers that Wolf omitted.

        The result of more than 25,000 hours of research, we are convinced that the Shapell Roster will be of interest to academic scholars, descendants, and anyone interested in Jewish American history. We hope to engage the public with primary source material--the human side of history--while significantly modifying the scholarship on Jews in America in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

        Based on your mission, I thought that your organization might be interested in this project, which we hope to make available to the public for the first time in 2019. Our searchable database, which will be free to the public, will go live with a limited set of records. As we complete additional research, more records will become available. We are so excited, and hope institutions like yours will be, as well.

        Through my communication with you, I hope to connect with

  • descendants whose ancestors served during the American Civil War and/or
  • organizations and institutions with information and sources relating to Jewish-American Civil War Soldiers. 
  • If you have any thoughts or questions, please do not hesitate to reach out.

Thank you,


Eliza Kolander

Shapell Roster Project


Shapell Manuscript Foundation



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