We are a world-wide group of researchers tracing our family roots from Jewish Brisk, now the city of Brest, Belarus, and the surrounding region. Our members live in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, France, Israel, Australia, Argentina, Brazil, and Russia.

Our goal is to share information and resources through this web site, e-mails, forums, newsgroups, visits to Brest, and face-to-face conversations. Inhabitants of the shtetlekh in this area shared many common experiences of schooling, commerce, and marriages. We know that travel among these towns was common for at least a portion of the inhabitants, and that there were strong social connections in some groups of towns. We hope that by studying multiple shtetlekh in the region, we will learn more about specific towns and families.

This site is dedicated to our ancestors, who continued to struggle despite the tragedies of anti-Semitism, economic hardship and many unexpected and uncontrollable political events. We are preserving their memories by remembering the times in which they lived. Many of us would not be alive today had not one of our ancestors emigrated from Brisk. View individual dedications by group members, here.

Welcome to the New Version 2.0 of our Website!
This is Version 2.0 of the Brest-Belarus Group website, published in Winter 2008. It replaces Version 1.0, which has been around since about 2005.

Here are some key points about this new version:

--The purpose of Version 2.0 is re-organization, clean-up, and preparation for new material. Very little new material has been added -- that will happen in subsequent versions. Exception: This new material about geography corrects a fundamental omission from the Version 1.0 of the site by explaining the geography of Brest Region and the area-of-coverage of the Brest-Belarus group. You'll also find maps added to individual pages about specific shtetlekh.

--You can access information about Brest and the Brest Region by using the Table of Contents menu at center left on all pages, or by viewing the site map. You can learn more about getting around (navigating) this site here.

--Links to administrative information are grouped in the page masthead, at the top left corner of all pages. You'll notice something new: that a page of Frequently-Asked-Questions (FAQs) has been added.Take a look!

--Do you want to locate material from the prior version of the site? You can see a re-creation of the Version 1.0 menu with cross-references to Version 2.0 pages, here. As of May, 2009, the Version 1.0 content is no longer available.

You can see a detailed description about Version 2.0, here.