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People throughout the world who are interested in tracing their Jewish roots and finding relatives will now have a vastly improved and readily accessible database of over 2 million names in a family tree format, thanks to a long-awaited agreement signed on Sunday, October 24, 1999. The three major Jewish genealogy organizations - the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies (IAJGS - 75 genealogical societies worldwide) , JewishGen and the Douglas E. Goldman Jewish Genealogy Center at Beth Hatefutsoth (the Diaspora Museum in Tel Aviv) - have agreed to pool their genealogical information. The agreement will allow this valuable resource to be available on site at the museum, on the world wide web, and on CD-ROM. Prior to this agreement, anyone searching Jewish family lines had to contribute their family trees to all three organizations to ensure that they could be found by lost relatives and fellow researchers. Now, an Australian consulting the database on the web might find a cousin in Chicago who had registered the family tree with JewishGen or IAJGS, and an avid genealogist cousin in Israel who had donated the family tree to Beth Hatefutsoth. Long-lost relatives can reunite and learn more about their shared history. Harvey Krueger, a Vice Chairman of Lehman Brothers, Inc., a genealogy enthusiast and philanthropist, envisioned this agreement to help Jewish people graft together branches of their families that were torn apart by the Holocaust and separated by emigration, and was the catalyst for its completion. Combining the three databases will create a 2 million-strong family tree of the Jewish people, a tree that can only grow and flower as it is nurtured by this agreement.
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