The JewishGen Communities Database is a master database of Jewish communities throughout the world, which unifies and links together all of JewishGen’s resources about each community.
Background
Previously, all JewishGen resources — the JewishGen Family Finder, KehilaLinks pages, the JewishGen Gazetteer, the Yizkor Book Project, JOWBR and other databases, Research Division and regional resources, and so on — were each independent projects, not linked together in any way, and in many cases were redundant or duplications of efforts.
The goal of the JewishGen Communities Database project is to create a master database of localities, and then link all JewishGen resources for each locality to this master database. Using this system, a user can easily see all JewishGen resources for any town, rather than having to search multiple locations on JewishGen, under various town names.
The JewishGen Communities Database contains each town’s geographic and political history, and all town name synonyms. Clicking on a town name in the JGFF will bring up a page containing all historical names and jurisdictions for a town, and links to all relevant JewishGen resources for that town.
The JewishGen Gazetteer
The USBGN data used by the JewishGen Gazetteer is a great tool, but it has several drawbacks as a Jewish community (shtetl) locator, namely:
- It lists too many towns, the vast majority of which did not have any Jewish population.
- It does not contain any historical or jurisdictional information, which could help identify the correct locality — especially problematic when there are dozens of localities with the same or similar names, and when country borders have changed.
- It does not contain Yiddish town name synonyms. Jews often had their own Yiddish names for their shtetls, which sometimes bore little or no resemblance to the official names.
The JewishGen Communities Database overcomes these deficiencies. It uses a different set of data, compiled by JewishGen, containing information on more than 6,000 Jewish communities in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, together with Jewish population figures, historical town names and jurisdictions, and links to JewishGen resources.
Some features of the JewishGen Gazetteer (formerly called the “JewishGen ShtetlSeeker”) include:
- Linkage to the JewishGen Communities Database — Jewish communities are marked with a special JewishGen icon.
- Sortable columns — clicking on any column header in the Gazetteer’s search results will sort the data by that column.
- Selectable central location — you can select from drop-down lists of more than 200 major Jewish communities to use as a central reference point.
The JewishGen Communities Database
The JewishGen Communities Database currently contains data for more than 6,000 communities, and will continue to grow.
Comparison with the Gazetteer
The following chart shows the differences between the JewishGen Gazetteer and the JewishGen Communities Database:
| Attribute | JewishGen Gazetteer | JewishGen Communities Database |
|---|---|---|
| Number of localities | ~1,400,000 | ~6,000 |
| Localities included | All localities | Only Jewish communities |
| Synonyms included | Official synonyms only | All known synonyms, including Yiddish town names |
| Source of the data | U.S. Board on Geographic Names | Experts at JewishGen have used multiple sources |
| Contents for each locality | Town name, official synonyms, latitude and longitude, distance and direction from a reference point, links to maps and radius search | Everything the Gazetteer has, plus much more: historical names and jurisdictions; links to JewishGen resources (JGFF, Yizkor Books, KehilaLinks and others); Jewish population figures; inset maps; a list of nearby Jewish communities; links to search JewishGen databases; and a list of applicable Research Divisions and resources. |
JewishGen Locality Page
Every community in the JewishGen Communities Database has a JewishGen Locality Page, which contains compiled information about that Jewish community. For an example, see the page for the town of Opatów, Poland.
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Alternate town names
The Geography & Context tab lists all of the alternate and historical names for the town, in various languages and transliterations. The language is indicated in square brackets.
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Links to JewishGen resources
The Essential Resources and Connect & Share tabs link to various standard JewishGen resources about this town.
- JGFF — the link shows how many matching entries there are for this town in the JewishGen Family Finder. Clicking on the link will list all of these entries.
- Yizkor Book database — from the JewishGen Yizkor Book Project database, we list all Yizkor Books which contain material about this town. Clicking on a book’s title gives full bibliographic information, including a link to the online English translation where one exists. Where the images of a book’s pages are online at the New York Public Library’s website, we link to those images.
- JOWBR — links to the JewishGen Online Worldwide Burial Registry. If JOWBR contains any data about a Jewish cemetery for this town, or about a landsmanshaft plot for this town located elsewhere, links to that data will appear here.
- KehilaLinks — if there is a JewishGen KehilaLinks site for this town, a link to that site will appear here.
- JewishGen-erosity — if there are active JewishGen projects for this town, links to those projects will appear here.
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Historical names and jurisdictions
The districts, provinces and countries where the town was located, during four historical time periods:
- Circa 1900 (before the First World War)
- Circa 1930 (between the two world wars)
- Circa 1950 (after the Second World War)
- Circa 2000 (that is, today)
Some towns were in four different countries during the four time periods, with widely varying town names.
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Jewish population
The Jewish population circa 1900, and some simple notes about the town.
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Maps and nearby Jewish communities
An interactive map of the town, and the nearby Jewish communities list — a clickable list of all Communities Database localities within 30 miles of the focus town, or within a 100-mile radius for localities in sparsely populated areas. Clicking any town in the list brings up the JewishGen Locality Page for that town.
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Search JewishGen
The Search the Database tab has two searches. The first searches the respective JewishGen all-country database for records from this town. The second searches all the text on the JewishGen website for any mention of this town.
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Additional information links
The Connect & Share tab lists bibliographic resources about the town — encyclopaedia articles, Jewish reference books, links to information on related websites — as well as any JewishGen Research Division that covers this town.
Interfaces to the Communities Database
There are many ways to reach the JewishGen Communities Database — from the JGFF, from the JewishGen Gazetteer, and elsewhere — and two distinct interfaces: a search interface to find towns, and a browse interface.
Search
The search interface allows you to query the database by town name. You can search by all of the usual methods: “Is Exactly” (precise spelling), “Sounds Like” (Daitch-Mokotoff Soundex), “Starts With” (prefix) and “Contains”. You can narrow your search by filtering by modern country, inter-war country, or pre-war country.
The query searches all of a town’s historical names, so you can locate a community by entering any of its former names, or its Yiddish name.
Browse
The browse interface organises the towns by their historical jurisdictions, so that you can see all of the Jewish communities within Vilna gubernia, or Prussia, or any other historical district. It is modelled as a collapsible tree of communities.
There are three different Community Trees, for three different historical time periods:
- Circa 1900 (before the First World War)
- Circa 1930 (between the two world wars)
- Circa 2000 (that is, today)
Linkage
The JewishGen Locality Page is linked to from everywhere on the JewishGen website where the town is mentioned — in the JGFF’s search results, in the JewishGen Gazetteer’s search results, in the Yizkor Book bibliographic database, in the JOWBR database, and elsewhere. These linkages will continue to grow.
Content last updated 22 February 2012. Rebuilt for JG40, July 2026.