Skip to content
Zakhor
Sign up
Zakhor Origin · History · Genealogy

Create your family's Great Book.
Remember your dearly departed.

The great history of the Jewish people begins in your family.Rediscover its famous figures, their works and manuscripts.Find all your ancestors thanks to a collaborative family tree.Enrich your lineage's Great Book.Get started — it's FREE, INSTANT and SECURE.

The injunction zakhor, which recurs nearly one hundred and seventy times in the Hebrew Bible, never commands us to write history: it commands us to transmit it.

Subscribe to the newsletter

One letter every Thursday. Free, unsubscribe in one click.

❦

Five tools, one memory

Everything the site does for you.

Great Book of a lineage

Benchimol

Variants of the name

Benchemol · Benchemoul · Chemoul · Chemouli · Chimol

zakhor.ai

Plate I

Watercolour by Eugène Delacroix: Saada, wife of Abraham Benchimol, and her daughter Préciada, seated in a room in Tangier in 1832.
Eugène Delacroix · CC0 · Metropolitan Museum of Art

01 · Great Book

The writing workshop for the centuries to come.

A typographic editor designed for the long narrative. Chapters, quotations, facsimiles, photographs, index of names. Print a bound copy.

  • Editorial assistant (archive suggestions)
  • Collaborative and family modes
  • Bound printing (cloth, leather, Bible paper)
Open the workshop
IsaacAttaliConstantine · 1833OureidaZerbibConstantine · 1834MessaoudAouizerateConstantine · 1848ImmounaCohen TannoudjiConstantine · 1851MardochéAttaliConstantine · 1864EstherAouizerateConstantine · 1872Simon VictorAttaliConstantine · 1904
Attali · Constantine · 3 generations · 1833–1987

02 · Tree

Seven centuries, a single gesture.

Build your tree node by node, or import an existing GEDCOM. Each person is linked to their places, their texts, their archival documents.

  • GEDCOM, MyHeritage, Geni import
  • Automatic duplicate detection
  • Public / family / private mode
  • PDF export & bound printing
See the Tree of Lineages
Toledo
Fez
Salonica
Vilna
Paris
Baghdad
Jerusalem
New York

03 · Geography

14 cardinal cities. Three thousand years of comings and goings.

Filter by tradition (Sefarad, Ashkenaze, Mizrahi, Maghreb…), follow the routes of the exodus, consult the memories of each community.

  • Expulsion routes, 19th–20th century migrations
  • Detailed entry per city (ketubot, synagogues)
  • Navigable era 1300 → 2026
Open the map
−586
1st Temple
70
2nd Temple
1135
Maimonides
1492
Expulsion
1791
Emancipation
1942
Shoah
1948
Israel

04 · Timeline

From −586 to the present day, a continuous memory.

Filter by theme (texts, figures, expulsions, emancipation), zoom century by century. Each event is linked to the places and people concerned.

  • More than 80 documented events
  • Filters by theme and tradition
  • Links to lineages and places
Browse the timeline
אִם־תִּקָּנֶה עֶבֶד עִבְרִי
שֵׁשׁ שָׁנִים יַעֲבֹד
וּבַשְּׁבִעִית יֵצֵא לַחָפְשִׁי חִנָּם׃
« If you buy a Hebrew servant, he shall serve six years, and in the seventh he shall go out free, paying nothing. »
Exodus 21:2 · ms. Paris Héb. 656

05 · Archival Items

Hebrew and French, side by side.

Read the great texts in their original language with a contemporary translation. Scholarly annotations, variants, index nominum.

  • 284 digitized archival items
  • Sources: Cairo Genizah, Sifria Tenou, Friedberg
  • Export .pdf, .docx, ODT
Open the library

The corpus is connected

What a lineage connects

A family name is not a list of dates. Around it, the site attaches what testifies to it — and each attachment can be traced in both directions.

At the centre

A lineage

Search your name →
01

A great figure

A rabbi, a printer, a physician. The documented figure is attached to his lineage, and his record links back to the family.

6,349 figures linked to their lineage

02

A work, a manuscript

A responsum, a register, an annotated title page: the archival items bearing the family name appear on its record.

2,802 archival items linked to a lineage

03

A tree

The figures of a lineage connected to one another by filiation draw the tree of the dynasty. It appears on the record as soon as three members are linked.

290 sourced filiations

04

A community

Communities rooted in the cities of the journey: what the family brought to life where it settled.

1,331 lineages leading to a community

05

Places of passage

Toledo, Fez, Salonica, Vilna. The sequence of cities crossed, century after century, exile after exile.

1,551 documented journeys

What you gain from it

A free archive, verified, living.

Zakhor is neither a paid genealogy service nor an artificial intelligence that invents your ancestors. It is an open archive, reviewed by humans, that you can read — and write.

01

Free and open

The entire corpus can be read without subscription or credit card. What is published is contributed to the common good: reusable, citable, enforceable.

CC BY-SA 4.0 License · open access

Browse the Great Books →
02

Sourced, never invented

Each fact bears its status — established, transmitted, hypothetical. The assistant proposes archives to cite, never to imagine, and nothing enters the heritage without human review.

Deposited · analyzed · reviewed · published

Read our commitments →
03

A corpus already connected

You don't start with a blank page: 7,391 lineages and 26,051 documents, already connected to the places, figures, and texts that traverse them.

Eight pillars · one Great Book

View the lineages →
04

Written by many hands

A family's Great Book is built by many — cousins, researchers, paleographers — and is read in 13 languages, everywhere the diaspora has settled.

Cousins · researchers · paleographers

Join the collective →
0
(1,119 generated)
lineages
0
(97 generated)
figures
0
(21 generated)
works and manuscripts
0
graves
0
(69 generated)
places
0
(51 generated)
communities
0
(40 generated)
institutions
0
(13 generated)
objects
0
(125 generated)
themes
0
documents
0
contributions
0
contributors
0
coordinators
0
manifesto signatories

Recent discoveries

The lineages joining the archive.

398 families documented this month. Your name may be next.

Israël

Paltiel

Oria → Sicile → … → Proche-Orient
IXe–XXIe s.
Maghreb

Serat

Algérie → Afrique du Nord → … → Israël
XIIIe–XXIe s.
Maghreb

Lasri

Galilée → Fès → … → Alger
XIIe s. av. è.c.–XXe s.
Angleterre

Cohn

Silésie → Breslau → … → Angleterre
XVIIIe–XXe s.
Italian

Finzi

Ancona → Padua → … → United States
13th–21st c.
Maghreb

Alliel

Constantine → Constantinois → … → France
XIIe–XXIe s.
Italian

Ovazza

Provence → Piedmont → … → Israel
13th–21st c.
Ashkenazi

Lewinsky

Judea → Poland → … → Israel
10th c. BCE–21st c.
Maghrebi

Amar

Judea → North Africa → … → France
1st c. BCE–21st c.
Maghrebi

Sudaka

North Africa → Spain → … → Israel
11th–21st c.
Maghrebi

Bedjai

Spain → North Africa → … → France
13th–21st c.
Maghrebi

Mguira

Morocco → France
14th–20th c.
Ashkenaze

Richter

Allemagne → Rhénanie → … → États-Unis
XIIIe–XXe s.

How it works

Four gestures, a lifetime of archive.

I

Search your name

Search within the lineages already documented. If your name isn't there yet, you add it.

II

Trace the thread back

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.

III

Write the book

Open the workshop. Tell the story chapter by chapter; the assistant proposes archives to cite, never to invent. Each fact bears its status:

EstablishedProbableTransmittedConjectured
IV

Reviewed, then published

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.

SubmittedAnalysedReviewedPublished

Variants

One name, a hundred faces.

שֵׁם אֶחָד — מֵאָה פָּנִים

CohenFR · ang.
כֹּהֵןhébreu
KohenEN · acad.
Cohnall. 1820
Kahnals. 1750
Kahanepol. 1690
Koganrus. 1880
Cahenfr. 1808
Cahanneocc.
Coenit. ven.
الكوهينarabe
Kohanimpl. heb.

12 spellings · 9 languages · 3 centuries · same root כֹּהֵן

Search for Cohen: Zakhor also knows Kahn, Kogan, Cahen, כֹּהֵן. A scribe, a border, a host language — and a name's spelling changes. Search follows these metamorphoses, so your grandparents' name leads you to your ancestors'.

Explore the lineages →
Section III — Why now

A window that is closing

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.

« 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. »
Régine · 79 years old · Salonica → Paris
Write

A new way in

Bear witness to someone dear to you

Find the person in the collaborative tree — or bring them into it. Then deposit the whole story: what you know, what you have kept, what must not be lost.

4
Testimonies
2
Cities
i

Recognize them in the tree

We match the person to an existing node — not on the name alone, which repeats, but on the surrounding kin: dates, places, grandparents and great-grandparents.

ii

Write the story

A long writing space, with no artificial limit: the life, the character, the trials, what you want remembered. Draft saved and resumed at will.

iii

Attach the pieces

Photographs, videos, drawings, scanned letters — each with its caption, and its date where possible.

iv

Sign, as you choose

Full name, first name only, initials, or kinship ("his granddaughter"). The signature says who stands surety for the memory deposited.

Bear witness to a loved one →No account to begin — it's only asked at the final deposit.
Latest testimony deposited
« Pour moi Jeannette c’était Tata Jeannette. La petite sœur de ma maman. Mimi Michelle Jeannette est née sourde et muette comme on disait à l’époque Sourde oui, , méningite ?… »

Jeannette Encaoua (1939–2006)

Testified by Philippe Bensaid

The register

No ranking by renown: a chronological register, like a guest book. Each testimony takes its place as it is deposited.

A word from the founder

A place to gather

Zakhor will be a gathering place for Jews the world over. A place where you are proud of who you are.

Wherever you live — far from Israel, far from the United States, far from any community — you should never have to choose between the country you live in and who you are. Here, you are home.

Your roots, your history, your family, your ancestors. Your great men and your great women, your manuscripts, your languages, your communities. All of it is waiting for you, and none of it depends on an address.

And whatever your family has kept — the papers, the photographs, the names no one ever wrote down — you can leave it here, and your descendants will find it.

A people who keep their memory together do more than remember: they stand.

Bernard BensaidFounder of Zakhor

The Thematic Great Books · yet to be written

The catalogue is not closed

These themes have no entry on Zakhor yet — no one has opened them. Request one and it joins the catalogue: its Great Book will be written, then enriched by the collective.

Every request is reviewed by the team before it joins the catalogue.

The archive is collective

Four ways to contribute.

One enters the collective through a deposited document, a documented lineage, a skill offered, or a testimony for a loved one.

01

Deposit a document

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 piece
02

Document a lineage

Complete an existing lineage or create your own — a family, a place, a community. 7,391 lineages documented to date.

Document
03

Offer a skill

Palaeography, translation, transcription, genealogy: join the circle of contributors who decipher and review.

Join the collective
04

Testify for a loved one

A signed account of a relative, an ancestor, a departed one — anchored to their lineage in the collective tree, recorded in the register and on the map of memories.

Testify

Newsletter

Stay close to the living memory

No spam. Unsubscribe in one click.
Manifesto

Zakhor

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.

Deposit a documentRead the full manifesto