Top 10 Free Resources for Jewish Genealogy

Jewish genealogy often requires following families across shifting borders, changing town names, multilingual records, and archives scattered across many countries. In “Top 10 Free Resources for Jewish Genealogy,” Kaye Prince-Hollenberg introduces a practical set of no-cost websites that can help researchers locate Jewish ancestors, identify ancestral towns, find original records, and uncover Holocaust-era documentation. Rather than simply listing databases, the webinar demonstrates how these tools work together—showing how one clue from an index can lead to an original record, an archive reference, a town map, or even a photograph.

• Start with the right town and the right spelling. Resources such as JewishGen’s Town Finder help researchers navigate variant place names, historical jurisdictions, and phonetic spellings—an essential step before searching records from Eastern Europe and beyond.
• Indexes are powerful, but original records matter. Sites such as JewishGen, JRI-Poland, Gesher Galicia, LitvakSIG, FamilySearch, and the Alex Krakovsky Collection often provide links or clues leading to original documents, where additional names, relationships, occupations, and locations may appear.
• Holocaust and postwar collections can add deeply personal details. USHMM, Yad Vashem, and the Arolsen Archives offer survivor and victim databases, Pages of Testimony, camp records, displaced persons files, photographs, and tracing resources that may reveal family connections not found elsewhere.

The webinar is especially helpful because it shows how to think like a researcher: search broadly, compare results, follow archive citations, revisit databases as they are updated, and never stop at the index when an original record may be available. Viewers will also gain a better understanding of which sites are strongest for particular regions, such as Galicia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Poland, or Holocaust-related research.

Genealogists with Jewish ancestry—or anyone assisting others with Jewish research—will benefit from watching the full webinar for the live demonstrations, examples, and search strategies that bring these resources to life. Be sure to explore the additional links and guidance included in the syllabus, which provide a convenient roadmap for returning to each resource and applying the techniques to a specific family research problem.