Our mission is to preserve Litvak heritage by discovering,collecting, documenting, and disseminating information about the once vibrant Jewish community of Lithuania before its destruction in the Holocaust.
LitvakSIG has long-term relationships with the archives in Lithuania. We organize a number of geographic-specific project groups whose primary purpose is to identify and collect data from available records for Lithuania from the Russian Empire Period and Independent Lithuania. Contributors to our projects get access to the data we collect in Excel format.This LitvakSIG.org website is our platform for providing the information we collect and our searchable databases to the public.
In addition, we host a private website for our Dues-Paying Membership.LitvakSIG.com, which has additional content including records, catalogs of selected Lithuanian Archives, and scholarly articles.
Some highlights of our work include the
- All Lithuania Database (ALD), a free, searchabledatabase that currently has over 600,000 records and is updated quarterly.
- The LitvakSIG Online Journal, an edited, online journal with articles of interest to people researching their Litvak heritage.
- And the LitvakSIG Discussion Forum (“LitvakSIG Digest”), a moderated Internet discussion forum for the exchange of information on Litvak genealogy research.
 LitvakSIG is staffed entirely by volunteers. We are currently looking to fill three positions: Corresponding Secretary, Assistant Treasurer,and Kaunas District Research Group Coordinator.In addition, LitvakSIG is always interested in people with Russian and other language skills to help in our translation projects, big and small.Please see our Volunteer Opportunities Page for more details.
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Dedication of a memorial to remember those buried in the old Jewish cemetery in Panevezys Gennady Kofman, Chair of the Panevezys Jewish community, has organized a memorial to the Jews buried in the old Jewish cemetery in Panevezys.
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LitvakSIG Schedule at 2009 IAJGS Conference on Jewish Genealogy 29th Annual IAJGS Conference on Jewish Genealogy, Philadelphia, August 2-7, 2009 Wednesday, August 5, 2009 is LitvakSIG Day at the International Conference on Jewish Genealogy, co-sponsored by the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies (IAJGS) and the Jewish Genealogical Society of Greater Philadelphia (JGSGP).
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Lithuanian Archives and the LitvakSIG All Lithuania Database On Sunday, May 17th, Howard Margol, LitvakSIG Board member will be featured on the program The Yiddish Thing-Life in the Shtetl in a live interview.
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Welcome! We suggest you start with the Family Research Page of our site. It will help you get oriented and explain the basic information you need to identify to leverage our site and LitvakSIG to its fullest. We also suggest you read the About LitvakSIG section, paying special attention to the Projects and Data Page.You may also need to refer to our Glossary since you may not be familiar with the many Yiddish, Hebrew, and Russian terms that are used throughout the site, especially if this is your first foray into Jewish genealogy research.
Assuming you know your family shtetl(s) of interest or your family surname, you can dive into our All Lithuania Database to search for records. If you know your shtetl(s) of interest, you will want to learn about LitvakSIG projects that are collecting data for your ancestral shtetl(s). You can do that on the Projects and Data , District Research ,Vital Records , and Special Projects Pages. Once you have found your projects of interest,consider joining LitvakSIG and contributing to one or more LitvakSIG projects so you can get access to the data in Excel format.
We’ve incorporated a number of “deep links” in the horizontal menu bar, vertical menu bar, and footer to help you get where you want to go fast: the All Lithuania Database, Shtetl Database, Lithuania Given Names Database, Archives and Repositories, FAQs, etc.
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