A single engine to recover a name, a place, a text. A workshop to write the Great Book of your family. A living library where every contribution counts.
A lineage is not only yours — families, places, communities, works, objects, institutions: each is a Great Book →
Two gestures to begin. Memory and History, for their part, answer one another within each Great Book.
Five tools, one memory
Not a list of promises. A visual demonstration — click, try.
01 · Tree
Build your tree node by node, or import an existing GEDCOM. Each person is linked to their places, their texts, their archival documents.
How it works
Run a search across 5,200 documented lineages. If your name is not yet there, you add it.
Family tree, places of origin, texts and archival documents: the tool suggests connections to you — you are the one who validates them. A resemblance of names is never a filiation until it is established.
Open the workshop. Tell the story chapter by chapter; the assistant proposes archives to cite, never to invent. Each fact bears its status:
Nothing enters the heritage without human validation: what you submit is analysed and then reviewed before being published. You then choose the mode — family, collaborative or public — and print a bound copy for your grandchildren.
Recent discoveries
19 families documented this month. Your name may be next.
Variants
שֵׁם אֶחָד — מֵאָה פָּנִים
12 spellings · 9 languages · 3 centuries · same root כֹּהֵן
Every Jewish name journeys across languages and borders — Cohen, Kahn, Kogan, Cahen, כֹּהֵן. Zakhor knows these metamorphoses and shows, at a glance, how a name was written according to the era, the clerk, the host language.
Explore the lineages →« My grandmother sang in Ladino. She spoke the same words as her own grandmothers in Toledo, five centuries earlier. That is what a lineage is — a song that never stops. »
Within five years, telling authentic content from synthetic content will be impossible for the average person.
Video deepfakes, voice cloning, generated texts: every medium becomes falsifiable in undetectable ways. Tomorrow, everything will be suspect.
We may be the last generation able to attest the provenance of our heritage. The documents we can still gather, date, and situate today will be far harder to establish ten years from now. To deposit now is to offer the generations to come a documented foundation.
The archive is collective
One enters the collective through a deposited document, a documented lineage, or a skill offered.
A testimony, an annotated photograph, a record, a list of given names: every piece enters with the dignity of an archive — deposited, attributed, dated.
Deposit a pieceComplete an existing lineage or create your own — a family, a place, a community. 5,200 lineages documented to date.
DocumentPalaeography, translation, transcription, genealogy: join the circle of contributors who decipher and review.
Join the collectiveNewsletter
Remember.
The injunction zakhor appears nearly one hundred and seventy times in the Hebrew Bible. It never commands writing history: it commands transmission.
Our name honors Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, who showed that critical history did not extend Jewish memory — too often, it replaced it. We refuse that replacement, as we refuse its opposite: memory without rigor.
Zakhor holds the two together. The family story and the archival record. The tradition handed down and the verified source. The name whispered and the name recorded in the registers. Every page of Zakhor.ai bears its register — Memory or History — and neither judges the other.
Our mission
To transmit the memory of Jewish lineages: families, places, communities, works, objects, institutions. There are no small lineages, no minor communities, no geographies unworthy of a Great Book.
Our commitments
Collect faithfully. A grandmother’s testimony, an annotated photograph, a list of given names in a prayer book enter here with the same documentary dignity as an archival source.
Never erase. What is entrusted to collective memory is never withdrawn from it. What is corrected is versioned, never deleted.
Never fabricate. No invented dates, no obliging ancestors. We always distinguish the established, the probable, the transmitted and the conjectured.
Never appropriate. The memories entrusted to us remain those of the families and the communities. We are their custodians, not their owners.
Join us
You carry a name, a place, a story, a document. Deposit it. An undocumented lineage is a thread that breaks — and every thread counts for the entire People of the Book.
The imperative that names us is conjugated only in the present tense, for the future.
Remember. We will see to it.
