Ellen Kowitt

Ellen Kowitt is a professional genealogist and volunteer director for JewishGen’s USA Research Division. She has held leadership roles with IAJGS, JGSGW, JGSCO, NSDAR, and CO APG; completed ProGen; and attended SLIG and GRIP Institutes. Ellen’s paternal grandfather was born in 1904 in what was then the Russian Empire and is today Ukraine. She has visited Ukraine three times and obtained Russian Empire and Soviet-era records to successfully build her family tree dating back to the 1700s. Since 2018, Ellen has been a docent for Yahad in Unum and completed two levels of Holocaust by Bullets educator training. She was invited to contribute historical materials for a German-funded initiative, The Protecting Memory Project, which constructed memorials for placement on Jewish and Roma (Gypsy) mass gravesites in Ukraine. Ellen is currently working on documenting her great uncle’s trail at Babyn Yar as a Jewish P.O.W. victim along with her relative Yakov Kaper, who was one of few Jewish survivors. As a JewishGen Ukraine SIG town leader for Lyubar, Chudnov, Polonnoye, and Korolevo, she has created KehilaLinks websites, organized and managed records acquisition and Jewish cemetery cleanup and indexing projects, and she has developed relationships with locals who share genealogical materials not held anywhere else in the world. In the U.S., Ellen has indexed cemetery headstones for JOWBR in New York City, northern New Jersey, and in Colorado where she currently lives. She can be reached through her website.