Jewish Roots Resources

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International

• Wikitree has its own useful collection of Jewish Genealogy Resources
• JewishGen A free, easy-to-use genealogy website featuring thousands of databases, research tools, and other resources to help those with Jewish ancestry research and find family members.
  • Communities Database information about 6,000 Jewish communities in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East
  • Online Education JewishGen's online interactive courses in Jewish genealogy, to help you organize your information and begin to trace your ancestral roots.
  • JewishGen's Yizkor Book Project seeks to translate Yizkor books, memorials to Jewish communities destroyed in the Holocaust. Yizkor books contain descriptions and histories of communities, biographies of prominent individuals, lists of people who perished, etc.
  • JewishGen Family Finder (JGFF) is a surname and town register to contact other researchers with common interests. Why not invite them to WikiTree?
  • Family Tree of the Jewish People is a searchable database of individual family trees.

• International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies an independent non-profit 501(c)(3) umbrella organization coordinating the activities and annual conference of more than 70 national and local Jewish genealogical societies around the world.

• FamilySearch: Jewish Records These include vital records (births, marriages, divorces, and deaths) prepared by or for Jewish communities, registers of name changes, account books of congregations, circumcision records, and burial records.

• Sephardic genealogy resources

• Shapiro name and lineage

• The Ackman & Ziff Family Genealogy Institute : many valuable tools for the new genealogist.

• SynagogueScribes.com: fully searchable database of Ashkenazi Synagogue records, with the emphasis on pre UK civil registration, to help you trace your Jewish genealogy

• RTR Foundation: A Genealogical and Family History guide to Jewish and civil records in Eastern Europe.

• Gesher Galicia Gesher Galicia is a non-profit organization carrying out Jewish genealogical and historical research on Galicia, formerly a province of Austria-Hungary and today divided between southeastern Poland and western Ukraine. Search free ‘All Galicia Database’, ‘Map Room’, and archival inventories.

• Pomerania & Westprussia former provinces & church records,West Prussia Land Register and West Prussia Family Research (in German)

• Verein für Computergenealogie (Association of Computer Genealogy), mostly in German, but their main page can be converted to English, French, Danish, or Dutch and has several searchable databases.

• The Open Databases Project from the Museum of the Jewish People in Beit Hatfutsot, Israel. Millions of pictures, family trees, music pieces, stories of communities and more.

• Genealogy Indexer lets users search 904,000 pages of 1,816 historical directories (business, address, telephone, etc., mostly from Central and Eastern Europe), 114,000 pages of 256 yizkor books (memorials to Jewish communities destroyed in the Holocaust), 32,000 pages of military lists (officers, casualties, etc., mostly from the Russian Empire and Poland), 45,000 pages of community and personal histories, and 24,000 pages of Polish secondary school annual reports and other school sources. New genealogy sources are added weekly.

• Jewish Genealogy on AncestorCloud covers areas such as immigration/emigration, the effects of boundary and border changes on Jewish family history research, Eastern Europe and North American Jewish genealogy research, and advice for those researching families of Ashkenazi heritage.

• AncestorCloud lets you post genealogy research tasks/projects and name your own "reward price" you'll pay to someone who helps you. They have on-the-ground researchers worldwide who then submit proposals for helping with your requests, and you choose who - if anyone - you want to help you. It's a great way to overcome distance and language barriers when international research is needed.

• British Jewry- a variety of information about Jews in Britain

• World Jewish Population 2010 cited on Historical Jewish Population Comparisons on Wikipedia

• Pre-1650 Jewish Women’s Wills

Netherlands

• explanation for identity cards in Dutch, use Google Translate Extension for other languages
• “Jewish Dutch Records: Jewish marriages and records from the Amsterdam archive
• Portuguese Community of Amsterdam (records from the city archives)
• dutchjewry.org The Centre for Research on the History of Dutch Jewry (links to archives, etc.)
• Nederlandse Kring voor Joodse Genealogie The Netherlands Society for Jewish Genealogy (NKvJG) unites genealogists and other enthousiasts studying the genealogies and histories of Jewish families in The Netherlands – ashkenasic and sephardic. (in Dutch)
• Joods Nederland (hundreds of links to Dutch-Jewish sites, in Dutch)
• This project includes a website of the Amsterdam City Archives with a database with all the names and stories of the 389 men arrested in October 1941
• Jewish cemetery search site of De Joodse Gemeente Amsterdam (in Dutch)
• Hebrew and Judaic Manuscripts in Amsterdam Public Collections, Volume 1 (geredigeerd door Lajb Fuks,Renate G. Fuks-Mansfeld) —Collected by Bea Wijma
• JoodsMonument Holocaust memory page. Info added on Holocaust victims (biography) added by surviving relatives and/or researchers,

• more specific to find at Joods Monument about Apeldoornsche Bosch and more.

Poland

• Polish government archives, in Polish
• Jewish Records Indexing - Poland - an extensive collection of records from Polish archives, with opportunities to contribute to online indexing
• Jewish Cemetery Listings
• Website on Krakaw by Dan Hirschberg https://ics.uci.edu/~dan/genealogy/Krakow/

Sweden

• Judiska släktforskarföreningen i Sverige (The Jewish Genealogy Society in Sweden)

Ukraine

• Yekaterinoslav:
  • Wikitree category
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yekaterinoslav_Governorate

US & Canada

• NYC Vital Records online Jewish & non-Jewish, everyone in NYC can check for their family records here. See here for years and boroughs covered so far.

• American Jewish Historical Society Does one exist in your area? If so, we can list your city's or town's society or association here: Phoenix, Arizona;

• American Jewish Archives which includes, among much more, Concise Dictionary of American Jewish Biography This Concise Dictionary consists of almost 24,000 brief biographies of American Jews. And a searchable “First American Jewish Families” The sources are listed in the bibliography.

• Jewish Genealogical Society of New York, of Connecticut, of Michigan, of Greater Boston, of Colorado See also the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies above.

• Rhode Island Jewish Historical Association extensive archive about Rhode Island Jewry. Its abundant collections include more than 5,000 photographs, manuscripts, a complete run of the Rhode Island Jewish Herald and Federation Voice, congregational and organizational records, city directories, oral history recordings, and a large number of artifacts.

• Institute of Southern Jewish Life Six departments (Community Engagement, Education, History, Museum, Programming, and Rabbinic Services) cover thirteen states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.

• List of Genealogy Links: By five-time author Bill Gladstone, a Toronto Canada journalist and genealogist. He is publisher of Now and Then Books. This site supports a list of links to mostly Canadian genealogical sites.

Online Books & Newspapers

• A list of Jewish Newspapers: World Jewish Newspapers For USA: US Jewish Newspapers

• Jewish Encyclopedia This website contains the complete contents of the 12-volume Jewish Encyclopedia, which was originally published between 1901-1906. The Jewish Encyclopedia, which recently became part of the public domain, contains over 15,000 articles and illustrations. This online version contains the unedited contents of the original encyclopedia. Since the original work was completed almost 100 years ago, it does not cover a significant portion of modern Jewish History (e.g., the creation of Israel, the Holocaust, etc.). However, it does contain an incredible amount of information that is remarkably relevant today.

Other Reading

• Avotaynu Guide to Jewish Genealogy(2004) by Sallyann Amdur Sack (Author, Editor), Gary Mokotoff (Editor) ISBN-13: 978-1886223165 ISBN-10: 1886223165

• Handbook of Ashkenazic Given Names and Their Variants (English and Yiddish Edition) (2009) by Alexander Beider

• Also by Alexander Beider: :Italian Jewry and names and the history of Jews in France

• Where Once We Walked (full title: Where Once We Walked: A Guide to the Jewish Communities Destroyed in The Holocaust),(1991) compiled by Gary Mokotoff and Sallyann Amdur Sack,. 37,000 town names in Central and Eastern Europe focusing on those with Jewish populations in the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries and most of whose Jewish communities were almost or completely destroyed during The Holocaust. ISBN-13: 978-0962637315 ISBN-10: 0962637319

Cemeteries

• International Jewish Cemeteries Project A good resource for Jewish cemeteries worldwide, but it's not comprehensive. For example, Elyria Jewish Cemetery (found in the Military Challenge) is not listed on that site.

• FamilySearch Wiki on Jewish Cemeteries many links and resources.

• Findagrave.com By typing "Jewish" in the cemetery search function on Findagrave.com, the site returns over 300 cemeteries worldwide.

• Golden Hill Cemetery a historic Jewish cemetery in Lakewood, Jefferson, Colorado.

• Jewish Cemetery Wikipedia entry for Jewish Cemeteries, including a list of cemeteries by country.

Holocaust

• A Wikitree page: Holocaust Encyclopedia
• https://www.bundesarchiv.de/gedenkbuch/directory.html -- Regarding those who have died in the WWII camps (concentration camps and death camps).

• US Holocaust Memorial Museum Holocaust Survivors and Victims Database

• Database of names of Jews of Thessaloniki who were deported to the Nazi camps Thessaloniki (also known as Salonika) was one of the largest communities of Sephardic Jews.

• Yad Vashem the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre, the central database of victims’ names and of those that did all they could to save Jewish people acknowledge by Yad Vashem.

• How to Document Victims and Locate Survivors of the Holocaust: Documenting Victims, Locating Survivors (Avotaynu Monograph,1995) by Gary Mokotoff ISBN-13: 978-0962637384 ISBN-10: 0962637386

• DNA Research Studies of Rabbinical Lineages and their Importance to Jewish Genealogy

• GenWiki: a metasearch engine

• Avotaynu - publisher of the Anthology of Jewish Genealogy

• Wikipedia entry with several links to other sources on Jewish surnames

• Genealogy Indexer: Search 1,326,000 pages of 2,571 historical directories (business, address, telephone, etc., mostly from Central and Eastern Europe), 114,000 pages of 256 yizkor books (memorials to Jewish communities destroyed in the Holocaust), 32,000 pages of military lists (officers, casualties, etc., mostly from the Russian Empire and Poland), 45,000 pages of community and personal histories, and 24,000 pages of Polish secondary school annual reports and other school sources.

• Judaism 101 A site map for Judaism 101, an encyclopedia of information about Judaism, Jewish practices, holidays, people and beliefs. For beginners, intermediate or advanced readers.

• Cyndi's List of Jewish links including Maps of Jewish Communities 1750-1950

• Jewish Virtual Library An online resource on Jewish history, politics, and culture "from Anti-Semitism to Zionism"

• Morts en déportation by Legifrance a series of official decrees with list of people who have the "Mort en Déportation" mention. It provides full birth details which may be helpful. (Not all of them were Jewish, but most of them).

Miscellaneous Cultural Items

• http://www.milkenarchive.org/ The Milken Archive of Jewish Music: lots of online music and videos, with GREAT SONGS OF THE AMERICAN YIDDISH STAGE: A Multi-part Exhibition on the American Yiddish Theater
• http://ukjewishfilm.org/film/hava-nagila Hava Nagila (The Movie): a documentary romp through Jewish history
• http://jewishweek.timesofisrael.com/hava-Nagila Hava Nagila, an exhibit at the Museum of Jewish History.
• Defiant Requiem a Huffington Post article with some film clips of the PBS film Defiant Requiem the story of Rafael Schachter, a Jew Who Led 16 performances of Verdi’s Requiem Mass in Terezin Concentration Camp
• https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/naming-children/ -An article by David Novak on naming Jewish babies, the commonly used practices.
• https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2840&context=gc_etds Greenberg, Jason H., "From Rochel to Rose and Mendel to Max: First Name Americanization Patterns Among Twentieth-Century Jewish Immigrants to the United States" (2017). CUNY Academic Works.

Holding Spot - Need to File

Suggestions

A suggestion to add Jewish Y-DNA subclades (if they are already not on Wikitree.)” Submitted by Skye Driggs.