A user’s guide to www.zikaron.tourolib.org

Project Zikaron, from Touro University Libraries, offers free access to thousands of books, articles, manuscripts, and documents about Jewish communities worldwide, especially those destroyed in the Holocaust. More than 1,200,000 pages are searchable, mostly in Hebrew, Yiddish, English, German, French, and Russian. Everything is organized around towns. If you know the name of a city, town, or village, you can find every resource that mentions it.

New to Project Zikaron? Watch our 3-minute quick tour to get started immediately.

1. Start with a town

▶ Watch the Quick Start / Overview (3 min)

Town Search, the main box on the home page, covers 16,070 places and 34,771 variant names.

• Type the current, former, or Yiddish name of a town. Any of them will work.
• Choose a match option (see table). Sounds Like, the default, is the best first choice if you are unsure of the spelling.
• Optionally narrow by country or region.
• Click Search. Results open in a new tab.

Option	What it does
Sounds Like	Names that sound alike (Daitch-Mokotoff Soundex). Best when you know only how a name was pronounced.
Phonetically Like	Phonetic matches across languages (Beider-Morse).
Contains	Names containing what you typed.
Starts With	Names beginning with what you typed.
Is Exactly	The exact name only.

Tip: The keyboard icon beside the search box opens an on-screen Hebrew/Yiddish keyboard. The home page also links to a tool that transliterates English spellings of surnames into Hebrew or Yiddish.

Reading the search results

Each result lists the current name, former or Yiddish names in parentheses, and today’s country, for example Bauska (Bausk, Boysk), Latvia. The number beside it is how many resources the site holds for that town. Yellow highlighting means the site is not certain it has identified the right locality. Click the name to open the town page. Note that Selected Towns (top menu) lists a sample of towns with an especially varied set of resources.

Other ways to find a town

• Interactive Map: click a pin to open a town page. Good for exploring the area around a town.
• Listed by Country: an alphabetical list of every town, with resource counts.

2. The town page

• Name and location: the town’s names, its coordinates (click to open Google Maps), and resource count.
• Resources: every book, article, or document mentioning the town, by publication year, with title, year, category (Yizkor Books, Autobiographies, Communal Histories, Prenumerantn, Cemeteries, Pinkasim), original-language title, and author. See Note flags extra information about an item.
• Nearby Localities and Map: other towns in the collection, by distance. Often the fastest route to material on a small village, since larger towns nearby have more. Click Load more for additional towns.
• External Links: other websites with material on the town, grouped by subject.

Click any resource title to open it.

3. Opening a book

The book page shows:

• Details: title (transliterated and original), category, author, year and place of publication, and language.
• Geographic Places: the towns indexed in this book, each with a page number. Click a page number to jump straight to that page.
• Read Online: opens the book at the first page.
• Full PDF: downloads the whole book. The file size is shown.

Reading page by page

Each page is a scanned image, with the title, author, and page position (for example, 78 of 205) above it.

• Previous and Next turn pages.
• The breadcrumb (town › book › page) returns you to the book or town page.
• Search Inside This Book finds a word within this book and lists matching pages. On-page highlighting does not work for multi-word phrases.

Tip: Most books are indexed by page number, but some use image numbers when the page numbering is inconsistent. The Geographic Places list already links to the correct image, so clicking through from there is the most reliable way to access it.

Tip: For Prenumerantn, Search Inside usually covers only the subscriber lists, not the whole book.

4. Full-Text Search

▶ Watch the Detailed Walkthrough (6 min)

Full-Text Search looks for words anywhere in the scanned text of the whole collection: more than 1,200,000 pages in over 30 languages. Use it for a surname, a street, a synagogue, an institution, or any phrase.

• Type a word or phrase in the Full-Text Search box on the home page and click Search. Results open in a new tab.
• Each result shows the book title, year, page number, and author. Click it to open that page.
• Under Limit your search (left), click a Category or Book to narrow results. Counts are shown in parentheses.

Advanced Search

• Advanced Search (top menu) adds Exact Phrase, All Words, Any Word, Boolean (AND, OR, NOT), and Bibliographic Search by title or author.
• Entries that are not towns: organizations, institutions, movements, and topics, such as the Joint Distribution Committee or Beis Ya’akov schools.

Getting better results

• Try the name in more than one language and spelling. A surname may appear in Hebrew letters in one book and Latin letters in another.
• The text comes from OCR of old scans, so some words are misread. If a search finds nothing, try a shorter or more distinctive word, or go to the town page, which was indexed by hand.
• For Hebrew or Yiddish, use the on-screen keyboard icon.

5. Browse by category (all resources are also included in Town Search)

• Pinkasim: 18th- and 19th-century Jewish communal registers, with images. Many also have summaries and full, searchable transcriptions.
• Yizkor Books: over 1,250 memorial books, yizkor journals, and landsmanshaft publications.
• Autobiographies: over 1,200 memoirs, with a list by author surname.
• Cemeteries: books, articles, and burial-society ledgers on local Jewish cemeteries and tombstone inscriptions.
• Prenumerantn (Pre-Subscribers): lists of advance book buyers, printed in rabbinical works and organized by town.
• Documents and Manuscripts
• Communal Histories: local histories, biographies, and works on communities, their rabbis, and prominent citizens. Includes all resources not in any of the categories above.
• Recent Additions (the past 30 days)

6. More help

• About (bottom of every page): the collection, its categories, and how towns are named.
• Weekly Bulletin (top menu): sign up for news of additions.
• Translation help: the About page lists free volunteer translation groups and the YIVO translators list.
• Contact Us: questions, corrections, and offers of material are welcome.

Quick start

1. Type a town name in Town Search and click Search.
2. Click the town to open its page.
3. Click a book title, then the page number next to the town’s name.
4. Use Nearby Localities for surrounding villages.
5. Use Full-Text Search to look for a family name across every book at once.