Search the collections at the Center for Jewish History
For guidance on locating records from your town, please consult our country-by-country research guides at libguides.cjh.org/genealogyguides.
There are many sources of information on the history of your town’s Jewish community. The following is a sampling of some of the major resources for town history research. For country-specific guidance, please see our complete list of research guides at libguides.cjh.org/genealogyguides. You may also search for your town(s) of interest in the Center for Jewish History’s online catalog at http://search.cjh.org to find related memoirs, biographies, oral histories, general histories, and more, which may provide background descriptions of the town(s).
JewishGen hosts web pages for about 25 Special Interest Groups (SIGs), each of whose interest is a specific geographic region of origin.
JewishGen also hosts discussion group mailing lists for many of these SIGs; as well as a searchable archive of all messages posted to the SIG Mailing Lists since July 1998.
In addition, JewishGen hosts KehilaLinks, a project facilitating web pages commemorating the places where Jews have lived. These web pages may contain information, pictures, databases, and links to other sources providing data about the place commemorated.
These are memorial books commemorating Eastern European Jewish communities. They were generally compiled by a society of ordinary people who originated in the community (“landsmanshaft”), who remembered life in their hometown, rather than by professionals. They often convey the culture and feeling of Jewish life in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust through personal narratives, photographs, maps, and drawings.
For information on where to find a Yizkor book pertaining to your ancestral town, please see our research guide on Yizkor books.
Pinkas ha-Kehillot (Yad Vashem). This is a multi-volume encyclopedia of towns in Europe and northern Africa, organized by country, that provides brief town histories and demographic information. [In Hebrew]
Reading Room DS 135 .E81 (several)
Spector, Shmuel, ed. Encyclopedia of Jewish Life Before and During the Holocaust (Yad Vashem & New York University Press, 2001). Multi-volume abridged English version of Pinkas ha-Kehillot.
Genealogy Institute DS 135 .E8 E45 2001
Skolnik, Fred, ed. Encyclopedia Judaica (Thomson Gale, 2nd ed., 2007). Multi-volume.*
* The online version is available on-site only at the Genealogy Institute. For assistance in accessing this resource, please ask a librarian at the reference desk.
Singer, Isidore, ed. The Jewish Encyclopedia (Funk and Wagnalls Co., 1906). Multi-volume.*
* Available online at http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com.
Hundert, Gershon David, and YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe (Yale University Press, 2008). Multi-volume.*
Genealogy Institute DS135.E8 Y578 2008
* Available online at http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org.