For 37 years, Gary Mokotoff and I had a grand time founding and publishing AVOTAYNU, the International Review of Jewish Genealogy. We came in at the beginning of organized Jewish genealogy and loved being part of its growth and development.  Five years ago, Gary’s ill health forced us to cease publication. Gary died last August, leaving me to mourn a dear friend and to feel sad when a former contributor or subscriber would write to ask who or what had taken AVOTAYNU’s place. I had no satisfactory answer.

Happily, just a few weeks before Gary died, in time for him to know and appreciate it, the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies (IAJGS) awarded its John Stedman Memorial Grant to the International Institute for Jewish Genealogy (IIJG) to found a new journal, with me as editor.

As former readers can see, I am keeping the title of my AVOTAYNU column, a bow of sorts to continuity and remembrance, but clearly this new publication is not AVOTAYNU. We call it simply JEWISH GENEALOGY, the Journal of the International Institute for Jewish Genealogy (IIJG). Our intent is to publish several times a year with the occasional single, stand-alone essay.

This is a free-of-charge, peer-reviewed, online publication, open to submissions from anyone who wishes to contribute.  Much has changed in the Jewish genealogy world in the years since Gary and I founded AVOTAYNU, and our new publication will reflect these changes. We want to be on the cutting edge of thought and innovation in the Jewish genealogy world, and we solicit essays that focus on new methodologies, new sources and new ideas, and that have not been previously published elsewhere in English. Articles that have been published in another language will be considered if translated into English. Everyone is invited to send their contributions and/or queries to journal@IIJG.org. Letters to the editor also are welcome.

Perhaps the biggest change in genealogy is the role of the Internet. Genealogists seldom go to archives now as the source for their information. Rather, they use some of the many commercial and non-commercial websites for their data. They also are interested in branching out beyond simply constructing who-begat-whom lineages and want to know more about the contexts of their ancestors’ lives. Interviewing relatives remains an essential first step for most and DNA testing shows signs of becoming a relevant, useful tool.

We launch this, our first edition of JEWISH GENEALOGY, with these changes in mind. Bill Gladstone, whom former AVOTAYNU readers will recognize as our long-time book review editor, has come out of retirement to introduce the psychological view of Jewish genealogy with a book on why we do this, researched and written by three Australian psychologists. That was the title of a panel I organized for our first international Jewish genealogy conference in Jerusalem in 1984, and I also am a psychologist!

You can’t go to the gathering of most any Jewish organization these days without hearing about the importance of Jewish identity and in our leadoff article Bernard Markowicz delves into the cutting-edge topic of “Genealogy and Identity” with a broad, detailed plan to produce “deeper insight into Jewish identity, continuity, or meaning.” It’s a sort of call to arms genealogically; we’d like to hear what you, our readers, think of it.

Wikipedia defines identity as “the fact of being who or what a person is.” When you think about it that way, maybe nothing is more basic than our name. That’s how we introduce ourselves to others and it seems fitting to introduce our new journal with a focus on names. It’s one of the two themes underlying the articles in this issue. At the same time, although much has changed in how we pursue genealogical research, the discipline always has been interdisciplinary, that has not changed, and it is the second theme underlying the essays presented here.

Ami Elyasaf reports on how to mine the most information out of the Paul Jacobi studies. Jacobi studied what he called “the leading Ashkenazi families of Europe” most of them rabbis, “when they first emerged from obscurity” in about the 13th century to the French Revolution. Gary Mokotoff who created, named, and donated to JewishGen, the “Family Tree of the Jewish People”, dubbed Jacobi’s work “The Skeleton of the Family Tree of the Jewish People,” because the rabbis had so many offspring and so many contemporary Ashkenazi Jews descend from them whether we know it or not. Hidden within the Jacobi “chapters” is data about many more families’ names than are cited in the chapter headings. Follow Elyasaf’s directions to obtain as much information from this source as possible.

Alexander Beider, the world’s expert on Jewish onomastics, focuses a few centuries later than Jacobi as he shows us how analysis of Jewish names can illuminate the complex migratory origins of a single Jewish population, the Grana of Tunisia.

Echoing Bernard Markowicz’s approach, Boris Czerny has assembled a large, multi-disciplinary team to employ the cutting edge in AI and other tools “to give a name, a face, and an identity to each of the victims” of the Holocaust in the Belarussian city of Brest-Litovsk.

Observing that Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jewish genealogical research is vigorous and successful, Jacob Rosen reminds us that the Jews of the Levant remain relatively unexplored. Noting that all genealogy research must begin with family names, these are the topic of Jacob Rosen’s contribution, the Jews of Baghdad of the last 150 years. Unable to access Iraqi archives, Rosen reports on the alternate sources he has found and in a couple of vignettes shows some of the usefulness and potential ethical complications arising from this research.

Veteran, multilingual scholar Harold Rhode offers a charming description of his search for his true Hebrew name, which he considers basic to the deepening development of his Jewish identity.

Maybe more than anyone else, Adam Brown and Michael Waas have brought the science of DNA research into the realm of Jewish genealogy. We conclude this, our inaugural issue of JEWISH GENEALOGY, with their thoughtful discussion of Jewish memory as they explain what the hard science of genetics brings to the pursuit of family history. In their words, “Why does this matter? Because genealogy without context and history is little more than a wish list of beliefs transformed into seemingly correct facts. Jewish history, by contrast, belongs largely to the countless men and women whose names were never recorded and whose lives left no written trace.”