Am haZikaron Institute

The spirit of the history of the people lies at the basis of our national self-identification. Our sages say that people that fail to keep the past in memory will lose the future as well. Realizing this, a group of volunteers founded the non-profit Institute Am HaZikaron in 1998. The vision of the Institute founders was to create a platform that could realize a real, factual and “personal” connection between the past and today for every now living Jew.

The goal of the Institute is to restore the history, the heritage and the life stories of the ancestors of the modern Jewish families in order to create the bond between today’s Jewry and its historic past. The results of this work will be available to the general public, enabling any Jew to find his/her family roots. The Institute’s purpose is to recapture and continue the unique tradition of chronicling the Jewish people which began nearly four thousand years ago – and, as a result, to create “Divrei haDorot” (“The Deeds of the Generations”).

The Institute work has raised high interest in Israeli public, leading to appearances in several TV and radio channels and in interviews. The Institute’s projects were endorsed by ten Nobel Prize Laureates in different areas, two Presidents of the State of Israel, former Deputy Prime Minister N. Scharansky and other prominent public figures. In March 2007 one of the works of the Institute - “The Jewish People as a phenomenon of historical longevity: on the theory of meta-clans and the principles of survival” – has been awarded "Zeiti Yerushalaim" prize and medal for the contribution to the national heritage and its development. According to the "Zeiti Yerushalaim" prize committee, the Institute creates by its activity a new area of knowledge on a human being, the one that resonates closely with the deeper notions of the Judaism on the human place in the world.