Dev Builds Kehilot: AI Makes Unsearchable Holocaust Yizkor Books Finally Searchable
aloncarmel · x · 2026-09-11
The author unveils Kehilot, a project months in the making. In the 1950s-60s, Holocaust survivors self-published Yizkor (memorial) books in Yiddish and Hebrew — a few hundred copies each — recording who lived on which street and who prayed in which synagogue, ending with lists of names. The author and his brother are named after one such family from the Sokółka book.
The books were scanned long ago but are effectively inaccessible: dense Yiddish columns, OCR that shatters words into letters, zero search. Searching a grandmother's surname today finds nothing, even though it's printed there.
Kehilot uses AI to make these memorial books truly searchable.
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