Pruzhany Research Project Web Site

This web site was originally created by members of the Pruzhany district Jewish disapora in 1999. These included Herbert J. Maletz of Staten Island, N.Y., Jose Serlin of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Jay Lenefsky of Israel. Many other people helped and contributed material to the site, including Herbert Maletz's brother Leonard Maletz of Massachusetts and Florida (who died 18 June 2009), and David Waldshan. The site was initially was hosted at www.purs.org and was accessible only by subscription. With subscription funds the site's creators managed to finance research in Belarussian archives and build up a good collection of material from the entire Pruzhany district, including Shershev. Highlights include "revision lists" (a sort of census record) and a number of memoirs. From 2005 Jose Serlin maintained the site himself and in 2009 it was opened for free general access at the website pruzhanydistrict.com.ar. Jose Serlin died 8 March 2015. For several years prior to Serlin's death the site was inaccessible. The project has had several names over the years: the Pruzhany Research Project, then the Pruzhany Uyezd Research Society, then the Pruzhany Uyezd Research Organization.

I have reposted the site here in hopes that Maletz and Serlin's work will continue to help those interested learn about the Jewish communities of Pruzhany District. In doing so I have cleaned up a considerable amount of faulty HTML code so that the internal links within the site should be OK. I do not myself have time to maintain or upgrade the site but welcome inquiries from anyone who does.

Besides the main files (accessed below) you can read a few newsletters from the site's founders, dating from 2001-2002, and their initial "About Us" text.

-- Ian Watson, May 2016