Dear JewishGen Community,

We are pleased to announce a partnership between JewishGen and Dr. Jeffrey Malka resulting in the Jeff Malka Sephardic Collection.

Because of this agreement, more than 146,000 records which have been compiled by Dr. Malka are now freely available to JewishGen researchers. The collection includes records of Sephardic and other Jews from such countries as Algeria, Austria, Bulgaria, Balkan nations, Croatia, Egypt, France, Greece, Italy, Libya, Morocco, Spain, and Tunisia. There are also comprehensive records from Israel and the Holocaust. 

Many of the records in the Malka collection are not readily available from other sources. They include birth records of the Jewish communities, listings of Rabbis, dictionaries of Jewish surnames, casualties of war, and histories of various communities. 

Jeffrey Malka is a retired physician who is descended from a long line of Sephardic rabbis. He is a world renowned genealogist who researched his paternal family back to 13th century Aragon and Catalonia in northern Spain. He is the author of "Sephardic Genealogy: Discovering your Sephardic Ancestors and Their World", published in 2002, which was awarded the "Judaica Reference Book of the Year Award" for 2002. The book is now in an expanded 2009 second edition. 

Dr. Malka was an invited lecturer on Sephardic genealogy at the United States Library of Congress, numerous IAJGS annual conferences, the Washington Jewish Historical Society, and several Jewish genealogical societies in the U.S., Canada, Spain, and Istanbul.

We express our grateful and profound appreciation to Dr. Jeff Malka for his monumental effort to collect and make accessible Sephardic genealogical information, and for his generosity in contributing his extraordinarily unique and valuable collection to JewishGen.

Mention must also be made of the tremendous contributions and lifelong dedication of Mathilde Tagger, z"l who made many of the indexes in this collection available. For many years, and right until her untimely death, Mathilde Tagger was a very close friend and collaborator with Dr. Malka. Together they worked to promote Sephardic genealogy research and educate the public about its enormous potential. Her absence leaves a void that cannot be filled.

The Jeff Malka Sephardic Collection can be searched here: https://www.jewishgen.org/databases/jeffmalka/

Avraham Groll

Executive Director
JewishGen.org