Accompanied by an interpreter, she travels by car through the heart of the former Pale of Settlement working on behalf of American and Canadian Jews who are interested in their family trees and ancestral hometowns. Weiner's worksites are a few dozen unheated, unventilated state and local archives. She also has access to Jewish records in Poland to determine their holdings. Weiner makes copies of documents on a portable photocopy machine and stores the archival inventories on a laptop computer. Because the archives lack a Western-style banking system, she pays with American currency, reference books and office supplies.
Fax machines are popular tender.
All the local officials and townspeople, non-Jews, have opened their doors to her efforts. People have a civic pride and want to help you. I've never experienced any anti-Semitism. On her second visit to Ostrog, a town in western Ukraine, the director of the local museum offered to show Weiner a locked storage room. They were taking very good care of the items.