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Our Mission

Advancing ancestral discovery for anyone with interest in Jewish family history and heritage

Ancestral Discovery

It takes historic records, DNA, oral histories, research resources, and specialized tools to recover our Jewish history lost through the Diaspora.

The L’Dor V’Dor Foundation accomplishes its mission through research, development, education and awareness projects.

Our timeline begins with an unprecedented global project to discover all the hidden-in-plain-sight records, the Documentation of Jewish Records Worldwide (DoJR) project. 

This is only the beginning of our journey to restore the chain of the generations of our ancestors, l’dor v’dor (from generation to generation).

OUR TIMELINE

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2017

A Bold Idea

  • A bold idea — to discover and catalog all records documenting lives of our Jewish ancestors — including those “hidden in plain sight” and “second-tier” (beyond birth, death, and marriage) surfaces at the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies (IAJGS) and in AVOTAYNU. The catalog, JCat, will be freely accessible by all interested family history researchers as well as historians and academics
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2018

Research & Planning

  • After thought leader discussions on feasibility, the IAJGS adopts the Documentation of Jewish Records Worldwide (DoJR) strategic initiative, forms DoJR Executive Committee, and approves DoJR Project Plan
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2019

Outreach

  • Outreach begins to global content partners (key archives, libraries, and genealogy organizations), survey partners, technology partners and volunteers
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2020

DoJR Project Launch

  • Ukraine and Poland proof of concept discovers hidden-in-plain-sight records of 116,000 Jewish individuals in 4 weeks. User requirements collected for JCat
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2021

AI & Survey Advances

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) trained to read 200-year-old handwritten Polish records. Cyrillic, Yiddish, Ladino Solitreo and additional languages under development. Australia and Venezuela Records at Risk survey work underway using prototype JCat
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OCT 2021

L’Dor V’Dor Foundation Formed

  • LDVDF is formed to advance ancestral discovery in all areas (records, DNA, oral histories, research tools, and more). The DoJR project begins its transition from IAJGS incubation to LDVDF operationalization. More initiatives are on the way