Tip 8: More on Exploring Your Jewish Genealogy

There’s a growing body of resources available to folks researching their Jewish heritage. Here are a few sites I found especially helpful:

• JewishGen (powered by Ancestry and affiliated with the Museum of Jewish Heritage): a collection of databases, resources, and search tools that currently hosts more than 20 million records and provides a myriad of resources and search tools. Note that you can also often find sites specific to various cities through KehilaLinks, as I did for Radom.
• Yad Vashem (the World Holocaust Remembrance Center): the ultimate source for Holocaust education, documentation and research; based in Jerusalem.
• American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (“The Joint”): The JDC aided hundreds of thousands of Jews during the Holocaust; archives include over 3 miles of text documents, 100,000 photographs, a research library of 6,000+ books, 2,500 videos, and 1,100 audio recordings including oral histories.
• The United States Holocaust Museum’s Holocaust Survivor & Victim Resource Center lists several helpful resources (some of which are available at the museum, others online), including the International Tracing Service (ITS) and the Holocaust Name Search Database; you can also find a list of Library & Archival Collections here.
• The Holocaust and War Victims Tracing Center (HWVTC): a national clearinghouse managed by the American Red Cross. The HWVTC taps into a wide variety of resources beyond the ITS collection.
• The International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies (IAJGS) is an umbrella organization that coordinates the activities and annual conference of more than 70 national and local Jewish Genealogical Societies (JGS) around the world.
• BaSIA is a Polish site that allows you to search successfully for records in what is referred to as Greater Poland (Wielkopolski), a region that was once part of Prussia.
• Geneteka is a database hosted by the Polish Genealogical Society. While not Jewish-specific, its indexed records include Jewish records. Results are in Polish but easily outsourced to GoogleTranslate!