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Historians
Reading sources
Validate facts, date them, place each deed in its context.
zakhor.ai is a non-profit project whose mission is to gather, cross-reference and return the genealogies of Jews dispersed by five centuries of exile.
In a damp cellar in Salonika, a researcher finds a tin box containing hundreds of ketubot from the nineteenth century. Digitization takes months; cross-referencing takes years. Several families separated by the Shoah find there the trace of their grandparents.
From this work was born a conviction: scattered in hundreds of archives, there remain enough fragments to reconstruct most Jewish lineages back to the seventeenth century. What was missing was the tool to cross-reference them at scale.
No information without its document. Every assertion traces back to a deed, a stone, a page of pinkas — viewable, citable, contestable.
When the model proposes a missing link, it marks it, exposes its circumstantial evidence, and leaves its chain of reasoning open for all to examine.
The living choose what they share. No kinship is revealed without the explicit consent of both parties. The dead, meanwhile, have the right to attestation.
zakhor.ai is not a product; it is an instrument. It is built with those who know how to read sources — historians, paleographers, genealogists — and with families who carry memory. Every inference method remains open to scrutiny.
Validate facts, date them, place each deed in its context.
Read and date stones, pinkassim and handwritten ketubot.
Connect the links, flag inferences, correct errors.
Bring names, dates and stories; choose what is shared.
Preserve the original; we always point to the reference.
Design the cross-referencing and inference model, as open method.
zakhor.ai never takes possession of a collection: we index and cross-reference, but the original stays with its keeper. Every assertion points to its catalogue number and directs the visitor to the holding institution.
Families, researchers, archival institutions — there is a door for everyone. Tell us in two lines who you are, what you seek, what you can contribute.