More than 4,300 families, thousands of names that travel across languages and centuries — somewhere within this weave, yours.
If History recounts the people and Geography their places, the Lineages restore their living fabric: the families who, generation after generation, have carried the memory, the texts and the names. Each lineage is a thread — surname, variants, migrations, alliances — connected to the rest of the corpus.
The Lineages section of Zakhor has three ambitions:
★ Flagship feature
The flagship feature of the section. The Great Book of your lineage — a multi-secular narrative of a family, structured, illustrated and nourished by Claude, continuously enriched by contributors.
The detailed directory: more than 4,300 families referenced with surname variants, notices, cross-links and genealogical records. The entry point to explore a lineage in depth.
An aggregated, synthetic view of all the lineages — a quick journey by name, region or category to grasp at a glance the breadth of the family corpus.
The 14 categories of lineage: a geographical and historical classification (Toshavim / Megorashim in the Maghreb, the Grana / Twansa axis, the Sephardic and Ashkenazi diasporas…).
An introduction by Prof. Aaron Demsky (Memi De-Shalit database, ANU): how Jewish surnames are formed — patronymics, toponyms, trades, priestly lineage, ornamental names, acrostics and Hebraisations.
Life stories, testimonies and shared memories. The space where each family contributes its recollections, its documents and its voices to transmit them to the generations to come.
A tribute page to the victims. Zakhor links each lineage to the databases that preserve the names (Yad Vashem, Arolsen, USHMM, Mémorial de la Shoah), without copying any nominal data.
The visual and sonic memory of families: archival photographs, films, recordings and music that bring to life the heritage of each lineage.
Manuscripts, texts and printed works attached to the families — a reading of the documentary corpus through the prism of lineages.
A young-audience version of the families' history — to transmit the memory of the lineage to the youngest, simply and joyfully.
Test and deepen your knowledge of your lineage and its history through playful questions.
Each lineage is linked to the manuscripts it produced or preserved, to the places of its history, to the figures who arose from it. Conversely, each family record draws upon genealogy, geography and the documentary corpus. The lineage becomes the thread that ties a singular memory to the whole of the heritage.
