Summary

The eight pillars

The material is organized under eight pillars: lineages, great figures, great works, places, communities, institutions, themes, and objects.

Persons, by contrast, traverse these eight pillars rather than forming a ninth: the same person may be a published great figure, a grave recorded in a cemetery, a relative whom someone has testified to, a name in the people's tree. A single search interrogates all these registers at once — without ever returning an address, phone number, or the name of who deposited a dossier.

The agents

To do this, we make intensive use of Anthropic's latest 'frontier' models.

To date, 18 agents run continuously, sharing the work in three acts: those who search — the news of the Jewish world, inquiry into an entry, the work that documents it, the day it returns; those who deposit — the sorter, the router, the writer, the enricher, the reviewer, the translator, the illustrator, the measurer; and those who carry what has been found to the members it concerns. That makes 375 passages per day, day and night.

None of this is hidden: the memory workshop shows each agent, its time of passage, its queue, and its latest dated work; and discoveries tell, finding by finding, which book it was deposited in.

The Great Books

For each entry, the AI produces a Great Book that can be enriched at any time. It is never written from the subject's name alone: the model first receives the dossier — linked figures, places traversed, anchored archival items, neighboring books already published — and the plan emerges from the facts.

Every book carries a bibliography and a section 'The great figures'; each published version is reviewed by an adversarial judge whose job is to refuse — dubious date, undocumented figure, hagiography, unsourced claim — and whose verdict sends the book back for correction. Books are translated into the 13 languages of the site.

If a member has marked interest in a Great Book, they are notified as soon as it is enriched. They can also enrich it themselves: a photograph, a ketubah, a letter, a postcard, a family account — the item is reviewed, published, then deposited in the book, which is rewritten with it.

The close, the graves, the voices

Alongside the books, the site maintains what touches families. A catalog of Jewish cemeteries — 11,249 burial grounds recorded, 1,242,600 graves surveyed and hosted, each with its two dates when the stone bears them. A testimony is deposited for a close relative and enters the public corpus.

Two devices make speech possible, and they are not confused. Interrogate a great figure answers in the voice of a published figure, grounded in their works, and the exchange is public. Bring a relative back to life gathers the pieces of a deceased loved one in a dossier that belongs only to its depositor, and makes that relative speak only from those pieces — nothing else, never from a voice from beyond the grave.

What is public, what remains private

In the case of a person, the member may choose to keep private the information they bring: it is then accessible only to the family group they have defined.

All Great Books and their contents are public, except for information a member has brought and chosen to keep private. The dossier of a deceased loved one only leaves the private by an explicit gesture from its depositor, and after review.

What we do not do

No date is inferred from a range; no remembrance day is calculated, it is declared and proven by a citation. No image is fabricated: for lack of verifiable anchor, the book remains unillustrated. A finding whose book it belongs to is unknown remains in the journal rather than damage a book. And an entry with nothing to say says it: absence is displayed, never filled.

What does not yet exist

Concerning the feature 'retrieve, from a photograph like that of one's father, their name and birth date, all information concerning them': it is not yet fully developed, but it is part of our roadmap.