What we're asked most often — and what it's worth knowing before you start.
These answers concern the project itself: what it is, what it costs, how it writes, and what it does with what is entrusted to it. Questions about history asked of the site's assistant live elsewhere — see the questions put to Zakhor.
A free archive of the memory of the Jewish people. It brings together Great Books — one work per family, place, community, major figure, work, object or theme —, a catalogue of cemeteries and the burials recorded there, a tree of the people, and the archival items that document all of this. Each work is written on file, sourced, reviewed — and never closed: it rewrites itself as material arrives.
Yes. Consultation is free, with no subscription or credit card, and what is published is released to the commons under a Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 licence: reusable and citable. Creating an account is free too, and takes a minute. Only the bound volume, printed on demand and shipped to you, will be paid for when we open it — you will pay for printing and delivery, never for the text.
Not to search. Searching for a name, browsing the Great Books, opening a cemetery record or exploring the tree can all be done without creating anything. An account opens what commits you or concerns you: reading a Great Book in full, submitting an archival item or testimony, maintaining a private genealogical space, being notified when your family's book is enriched — and seeing what a stone bears beyond the name: dates, plot, position, photograph.
Type their name in the search bar: it queries all registers at once — recorded burials, the tree of the people, major figures, vital records, relatives you have testified about. The name is enough, the first name narrows it down. And if the spelling changed from one country to another — it almost always did —, search for the one you know: the catalogue carries the attested variants.
Agents running continuously, supported by Anthropic's models — and who never write based solely on the subject's name. The writer first receives the file: related figures, places crossed, anchored archival items, neighbouring books already published. The plan grows from the facts. Each published version then goes before a reviewer whose job is to refuse — doubtful date, undocumented figure, hagiography, unsourced assertion —, and their verdict sends the book back for correction. Members then enrich what the agents have written.
Each Great Book carries its bibliography, and each fact its status: established, transmitted, hypothetical. Zakhor constantly distinguishes Memory — what is passed on — and History — what the archive establishes. No date is deduced from a bracket; no day of memory is calculated, it is declared and proved by a quotation; no image is fabricated, and lacking an illustration truly anchored to the subject, the book remains without images. A record with nothing to say says it: absence is displayed, never filled.
By depositing what you have: a photograph, a ketubah, a letter, a postcard, a deed, a family account. The item is reviewed, published, then added to the book — which is rewritten with it. You can also testify about a relative: the account enters the corpus, attached to the person it concerns, and reappears on their record.
You retain your rights: you only grant us the right to publish, translate and format your contribution. Everything is public, except what you choose to keep private — the information is then only accessible to the family group you have defined. The file of a deceased relative belongs only to whoever submitted it and only leaves if by an explicit gesture, after review. A published contribution remains preserved after your account is deleted, dissociated from your identity; to request withdrawal of a specific document, write to us.
Search never returns an address, a telephone number, or the name of who submitted a file. A private genealogical space does not leave the family group that maintains it. And the device that makes a relative speak from their own archival items applies only to a deceased person: we do not reconstruct the speech of anyone living.
Below a burial, a correction form is open to all, even without an account. Everywhere else, write to us stating the page in question: the report is reviewed, and the book rewritten. If you have a source, attach it — it is what settles the matter, not the age of what is written.
The Great Book downloads as a PDF, laid out and ready to print, from its own record. The bound volume, printed on demand and delivered to you, will be offered soon.
Thirteen: French, English, Hebrew, Spanish, German, Russian, Portuguese, Hungarian, Yiddish, Dutch, Chinese, Hindi and Arabic. The interface is entirely available in these; the Great Books are translated as you read them, and a page not yet translated is served in French rather than left blank.
Write to us: we answer, and a question that returns ends up on this page.
admin@zakhor.ai