Dear JewishGen Community,

We believe that each and every person, no matter who they are, is important and should be remembered.
We believe that the culture and Jewish way of life which existed for hundreds of years should be preserved.
And we believe that we should help connect researchers, while offering them educational opportunities at the same time.

Since last year, we have enhanced our ability to provide JewishGen’s services in a variety of ways. Here is a summary:

Records/Collections

Our team focused on both acquiring and making available new data. This required new strategies and the ability to implement them. In addition, we raised money so that for the first time, we could pay for professional teams to help index and get records online. This has allowed us to dramatically expand our efforts, and to bring more information online that was previously impossible. As a result of this, we added more than 1 million records since last year and expect to add many more in the coming year (we just announced an update of 200k last week!). Notably, our Research Divisions expect to add hundreds of thousands of records in the coming months, our Burial Registry surpassed more than 4.25 million records, and our Holocaust Database surpassed 4.5 million records.

Partnerships:

We partnered with Yad Vashem, My Heritage, Kehila Kedosha Janina Museum in Greece, Camp Westerbork Memorial Center in Amsterdam, Theresienstadt Martyrs Remembrance Association in Israel, along with a variety of other Jewish organizations throughout the world in order to make more records accessible to Jewish genealogical researchers. 

• Yizkor Books: Over the past year, the Yizkor Book Translation team has updated an average of 30 books per month, initiated 10 new projects, completed the translations of 25 books, and helped the JewishGen Press publish more than 20 titles. The Yizkor Books are truly a treasure trove of information about how our ancestors lived, and I hope you are all taking advantage and studying this material.
• Newsletters: We continue to distribute a newsletter each month, which contains feature articles, information about upcoming programs, and project updates. We also started a new weekly newsletter called the “JewishGen Nosh” which contains highlights/links of articles of interest from that week.
• Networking: We welcomed more than 1,100 new members to the JewishGen Discussion Group. And the Jewish Genealogy Portal (on Facebook) has surpassed 61k members.
• Webinars: We continued to run our JewishGen Talks series of Educational Webinars reaching more than 20,000 people.
• Classes: Our Education Team ran more than a dozen classes reaching hundreds of students.
• High Holiday Companions: We published Holiday Companions for Chanukah and Passover, and the High Holidays, and distributed to more than 150k people. 
• Fellowship: We also ran a successful JewishGen Future Scholars Fellowship program, whereby we took a group of students to Poland and taught them about Jewish life of our ancestors, and then helped clean up a cemetery - literally preserving our Jewish history and heritage with their own hands. We are planning to do so again this year, and to run a similar trip for those “out of school” who would like to have such an experience. 

• Yahrzeit Reminder System: This new feature allows JewishGen users to enter the names and Yahrzeits of relatives and receive an email reminder each year as the Yahrzeit approaches on the Jewish calendar.
• 2.0 Modernization: There were some delays due, in part, to personal circumstances. However, we have made great strides in recent months, and expect that work will begin in early January.
• Security: We implemented an enhanced and highly secure User Login/Authentication system using a third-party vendor which specializes in this field.

There have been a host of other changes, but I hope that this has given you just a glimpse into the exciting things happening at JewishGen.

And now we turn to you. If you are pleased with the direction things are going, please consider making a gift in support of our work. Today, on #GivingTuesday, all gifts up to $40k will be matched 1:1 by an anonymous donor. If we can reach our goal, we will have raised $80k today.

If you can do so, please click here to donate now. A gift of any amount will make a huge difference. When donating, you can do so in honor/memory of a loved one or friend. As always, a membership gift of $100 will qualify for Value Added Services (which include enhanced search features). 

If it is not practical to donate online, a check made payable to JewishGen may be sent to:

JewishGen
Attn: Avraham Groll
36 Battery Place
New York, NY 10280

Thank you in advance for your support of JewishGen's important work - we are laser focused on making even more records, tools, resources, and educational resources available - but we can't do this without you. If you would like more information, please feel free to call or WhatsApp my cell at 973-433-6012 or email me at agroll@.... 

Sincerely,

Avraham Groll
Executive Director
JewishGen