JewishGen revamps online database to help people uncover their family histories
For people trying to piece together their family histories, a single record can change everything.
Karen Lichtman, an independent filmmaker from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, spent decades believing her grandparents were the first in her family to immigrate to the United States from Eastern Europe. Then, research through the website JewishGen led her to a relative she never knew about: her great-grandfather, Harry Aron Berger, who was born in 1862 in what is now Ukraine and is buried just 4 miles from her home.
"I can't express it. It's hard to put into words," Lichtman said as she stood beside his fallen tombstone at Washington Cemetery.
She read the Jewish mourner's prayer over the grave, believing she was likely the first person in her family to visit in decades.
"I have to fix it. He's not forgotten about. He might have been misplaced in all my family stories, but now I have him," she told Brooklyn reporter Hannah Kliger.
Lichtman's discovery highlights the role of JewishGen, one of the world's largest online resources for Jewish genealogy. Based at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City, the organization is preparing to launch an updated website next week to help users navigate millions of historical records.
The database contains just shy of 33 million individual records, according to Caitlin Hollander Waas, chief genealogist at the Museum's Kalikow Jewish Genealogy Research Center.
"There's a saying in genealogy that, 'When do people start doing their family research? When it's too late to ask,'" Hollander Waas said.
JewishGen was among the earliest online genealogy communities when it began nearly 40 years ago. Its records help people trace family histories through immigration, displacement and the Holocaust, offering a way to reconnect with histories that may have been lost across generations.
The updated website aims to make that research more accessible, particularly for younger users who will carry the work forward.
"The concern is always, you know, who's going to take care of this when I'm gone? Who's going to continue to work? Who's going to keep photographing graves all over the world?" Hollander Waas said. "I think that's the big thing, is making it more accessible for the next generation of users."
For Lichtman, the research has already reshaped her understanding of her family's journey to America. She hopes to visit Ukraine once the war is over, traveling to the place where her great-grandfather's story began.
"I was told for decades, 'Your grandparents are from countries that no longer exist and everyone else is dead,'" she said.
Now, she has a new connection to the past.
"That trip to Ukraine started with a trip up Bay Parkway to visit a relative who I had no clue came here," Lichtman said. "His immigrant story is my immigrant story."
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