Ecosystem & Positioning

Digital library of Jewish texts founded in 2013 by Brett Lockspeiser and Joshua Foer, under non-profit association status. It publishes the rabbinic corpus — Tanakh, Mishna, Talmud, midrash, halakha, liturgy — with its translations and apparatus of links, under open licenses or in the public domain.

318 million words and more than 3,300 texts, of which 75 million words in translation; both code and data are open and exposed through a public API. Sefaria publishes the text, never those who bore it: neither families, nor places, nor communities. This is exactly the inverse of our approach.

National Library of Israel, founded in 1892 and housed since 2023 in a Herzog & de Meuron building in Jerusalem. Its Ktiv project aims at digital access to all existing Hebrew manuscripts, assembled from collections of some 1,200 institutions worldwide.

Nearly 95,000 manuscripts and more than 1.2 million digitized images — that is, the bulk of known Hebrew manuscripts — plus more than 5 million books. It is the source of our own documentary holdings: the 26,051 records that Zakhor publishes come from Ktiv, and each retains the permalink to its original record.

Institute founded in Vilna in 1925 for the study of Yiddish language and culture, relocated to New York in 1940 after the destruction of its headquarters. It preserves archives, library, and collections on Jewish life in Eastern Europe.

The Vilna Project, completed on January 10, 2022 with three Lithuanian institutions, digitized approximately 4.1 million pages long dispersed between New York and Vilnius. It is the Ashkenazi counterpart to the Sephardic collections closest to Zakhor — and a reminder that our lineages do not stop at the Mediterranean.

Library of Jewish literature in open access: over 300 reviews, courses, annotated translations and anthologies, to encounter the works that illuminate Jewish existence. It is organized in five sections — Torah, Exile, At the Hour of Nations, Shoah, Israel.

Intellectual and literary project, written by academics. On 19 October 2025, after five years, its coordinators announced its closure due to non-renewal of funding; the most recent texts date from March 2026. The website remains entirely online and accessible today, and its coordinators announce its lasting preservation by the BNF under the web deposit scheme.

Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, in Jerusalem: Israel's national institution for documentation, research, and education. It publishes online the Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names, digitized archives, the Righteous Among the Nations files, and a photograph collection.

Nearly 5 million murdered victims are commemorated there by name — a scale without equivalent, the fruit of decades of collection. Yad Vashem documents a death; Zakhor recounts a lineage. On this ground we have no ambition: we point to them.

Institute of the University of Southern California founded in 1994 by Steven Spielberg after the filming of « Schindler's List ». It records and preserves filmed testimonies of Shoah survivors and victims of other genocides, gathered in the Visual History Archive.

More than 60,000 complete audio and video testimonies. This is the recorded voice of the survivor, at a scale that none replicate. Zakhor does not record: it connects these lives to their lineage, their city, and their community.

International Center on Nazi Persecution, in Bad Arolsen, successor to the International Tracing Service renamed in 2019. Its scope extends beyond Jewish victims alone: deportees, forced laborers, displaced persons.

More than 40 million documents, searchable by name in an online archive. Its participatory indexing program « #everynamecounts » engages thousands of volunteers on original documents — a more mature contributive model than ours, which we cite as reference rather than as competitor.

Heir to the Centre de documentation juive contemporaine — founded clandestinely on April 28, 1943 in Grenoble by Isaac Schneersohn, in the midst of occupation — the Mémorial de la Shoah is in Paris the principal venue for archives, documentation, and education on the Shoah in France.

Archives of over 30 million items, photo library of 280,000 images, library of 50,000 references; a second museum is to open in Nice in 2027. It is the French counterpart to Yad Vashem, and the natural neighbor to North African memories that Zakhor documents.

Founded in 1987 and run by over a thousand volunteers, JewishGen is now the genealogical research division of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, and the world's largest Jewish genealogy portal. It federates dozens of databases: the Family Finder (over 500,000 entries, 140,000 surnames, 18,000 places), the Communities Database (over 6,000 communities), the worldwide burial register JOWBR (4.2 million records, 7,300 cemeteries, 128 countries) and a Holocaust database of over 4 million records.

A resource for connecting a surname to its places of origin, its attested variants and the diaspora that bears it. Access to search tools is free; donations unlock ancillary services (alerts, boolean search). Data is contributed by researchers and remains under licence — it can be explored on the site but is not freely redistributable.

Geni, founded in 2007, builds a unique and shared world family tree, maintained by volunteer curators; its projects devoted to rabbinic dynasties make it a common resource in Jewish genealogy. The platform has been owned since 2012 by MyHeritage, a company founded in Israel in 2003 and owned since 2021 by the American fund Francisco Partners.

211 million profiles and over 85,000 projects on Geni; 7 billion profiles and 61 million trees on MyHeritage. The scale is beyond reach, and it is not our terrain: a tree there gives a node in a graph, where a Great Book gives a sourced narrative. We do not claim their exhaustiveness.

Formerly Beit Hatfutsot, the ANU – Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv traces the history and culture of the Jewish people across the world. It houses the Douglas E. Goldman Centre for Jewish Genealogy and a database of Jewish family names detailing the origin and meaning of thousands of surnames.

The Douglas E. Goldman Genealogy Centre brings together over 5 million individuals in tens of thousands of family trees deposited by the families themselves. The Memi De-Shalit database of Jewish family names — nearly 20,000 entries — provides etymology, variants and migrations for each surname, and retains no explanation without at least two independent sources. There are also community records, music, films and photographs. Everything is free. The museum itself clarifies that it does not maintain a list of Holocaust victims and refers to Yad Vashem.

A geo-archives project born in the late 2000s, Diarna — "our homes" in Judeo-Arabic — maps Jewish sites in the Maghreb and Middle East: synagogues, cemeteries, neighborhoods, schools, most often inaccessible, in ruins or already razed.

Over 2,800 sites documented — 517 in Morocco, 357 in Iraq, 322 in Yemen, 314 in Algeria, 233 in Tunisia — through photographs, satellite surveys and testimonies. The association remains active, though its public website is poorly maintained. It is the actor closest to our North African axis, and it does what we do not: geolocate the vanished place.

Founded in 1860, the Alliance Israélite Universelle is one of the oldest international Jewish institutions. It works for education, culture and the defence of human rights. Its website offers access to its library, historical archives, media library and its network of schools worldwide.

The AIU preserves one of the world's most important Judaica libraries: over 150,000 volumes, 1.5 million archival documents and nearly 4,000 fragments from the Cairo Genizah. Its digital library is freely accessible (20,168 documents, 433,418 images, for works published before 1947); the heritage collection is consulted on site, by appointment and by annual subscription. The Génération Alliance network connects alumni of its schools.

Opened in 1998 in the Hôtel de Saint-Aignan, in the heart of the Marais, the Museum of Art and History of Judaism traces Jewish life in France and Europe through its collections of art, ritual objects, manuscripts and archives.

Approximately 12,000 works and over 10,000 archival documents are accessible online. It is also the future custodian of the Morial database: proof that an associative fund can find, within a public institution, the lasting preservation it cannot afford alone. It is a question that every memory project — ours included — must ask itself.

MORIAL — MORechet Iehudei ALgeria, "the heritage of the Jews of Algeria" — is a non-profit association founded in France in 1995, with a sister association in Israel. It preserves and transmits the memory of the Jews of Algeria, a history that begins with the Phoenicians and ends in 1962 with the departure to the metropolis.

Its "memory collectors" gather video testimonies, recordings, photographs and narratives, and the website maintains a genealogical section. The entire database will be deposited at the Museum of Art and History of Judaism (MAHJ) in Paris for lasting preservation — a deposit announced but not yet made. It is a work of oral and written memory, centred on the lived experience of a community.

A non-profit association registered as IEMS (statutes of November 2021), the European Institute of the Sephardic World focuses on the shared contributions of Sephardic migrations across centuries and continents, and on the communities that are heirs to these cultures. Not to be confused with the European Sephardic Institute in Brussels, publisher of the journal "Los Muestros".

INSSEF collects, preserves and transmits what concerns the history, culture and journeys of Sephardic Jews. It lives through its conferences, colloquia and exhibitions, and through a regular newsletter — cycles on Israeli television series, colloquium "Minorities in Islamized Lands", video testimonies collection "Sefardim".