Dear JewishGen Community,
JewishGen.org and The Museum of the Jewish People at Beit Hatfutsot announced a strategic partnership today, bringing together two of the Jewish world’s most iconic names for innovation in advancing online genealogy and identity exploration.
The partnership envisions the that the family tree collections held by both parties, accounting for nearly 20,000 trees in total, will be completely accessible to visitors of both JewishGen.org and The Museum of the Jewish People. Beginning in the late Fall 2018, researchers will be provided with unprecedented access to vital Jewish family history information that is available in no other facility. This new search platform will dramatically increase the likelihood that researchers will find information they are seeking.
Avraham Groll, Director of JewishGen.org, stated, “JewishGen is committed to doing everything we can to provide the highest quality of access to records, information, and tools that researchers can utilize in their quest to connect with relatives, discover their unique family history, and understand what it means to be part of the Jewish people. Our new partnership with The Museum of the Jewish People will help us achieve this goal, by eliminating the need to spend time or financial resources searching multiple facilities. For JewishGen, connecting with The Museum of the Jewish People comes during a stage of significant growth from both an archival and technological perspective, and as we set ambitious strategic priorities for the years to come, I believe that this new relationship will herald continued opportunities for our organizations to collaborate on behalf of the entirety of the Jewish people.”
“Too often we see organizations cajoling for space and prominence, when they should be aligning. The treasures that JewishGen and The Museum of the Jewish People have each built up over the decades are invaluable and irreplaceable, and it is a privilege to be able to re-make that connection, through technology and partnership building,” said Dan Tadmor, CEO of The Museum of the Jewish People at Beit Hatfutsot.
For the Museum, connecting its Douglas E. Goldman Jewish Genealogy Center with JewishGen comes during the final development stages of its new “Open Databases Project,” due for launch later this year. The system will integrate each of the Museum’s five separate databases together with outside archives from partners such as JewishGen, allowing users to curate their own personalized library of Jewish life, drawing on genealogy, community, photography, music and film.
What’s more, through an open API and an enhanced data upload function, both developers and personal users can further enrich the archives at any point, by uploading their own institutional, personal and family content, creating a shared, online repository for centuries of Jewish life and culture.
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