After two decades of going down multiple rabbit holes looking for answers, I. Michael Snyder found his ancestors’ records from Ukraine.
“I was so excited; I’d been looking for years and years,” Snyder, the executive vice president of the Jewish Genealogy Society of Greater Washington, said. “It’s a real exciting moment when you have a breakthrough like that. … That opened up a whole piece of my family [on my] great-grandfather’s side.”
Snyder, a member of Temple Beth Ami in Rockville, is one of the many Jewish Americans now finding ancestral records from Ukraine. The “global home for Jewish genealogy” JewishGen went from roughly 200,000 genealogical records to more than 4 million since the Russia-Ukraine war began in February 2022, Snyder said.
Alexander Krakovsky, a Jewish-Ukrainian archivist, is leading the cause in efforts to legalize the digitization of Jewish records from Ukrainian government archives. Since March 28, 2023, Krakovsky and his team have scanned close to 3,000 metric books, indexes, name and revision lists, and censuses.
“Sadly, this is the upside of the war,” Snyder said. “Now, all of a sudden, the archive is recognizing that with the war, [Ukrainians] are in danger of losing some of their records and now they’re scanning them like they’ve never done before.”
These records predate the Holocaust, showing Jewish populations in Germany, Austria and Eastern Europe, according to Phyllis Gold Berenson, the director of the JewishGen Ukraine Research Division.
Berenson estimates that JewishGen’s Ukraine Research Division will double its transcription rate and the ensuing output for researchers starting in July: “We have many, many more [records] than we can deal with.”
“It means that more and more, [Jewish Americans] can find their ancestors, and more and more people every day want to find their ancestors,” Berenson said. “It means it’s easier; it doesn’t happen all at once. Genealogy is a slog. I always say it’s never finished.”
Snyder tapped Berenson to teach Jewish Washingtonians about the newly available records, how to access them and best practices for researching. The virtual program on July 20 was open to the community.
“The majority of the Jews in the Washington, [D.C.,] area are Ashkenazi, so they’re from Eastern Europe,” Snyder said. “They’re from the Pale of Settlement — everything from Ukraine down to Romania all the way up to the Baltic states. And everybody’s a mix.”
Berenson’s work involves overseeing the Ukraine research division of JewishGen, a team of 25 people who organize the many records that come in on a spreadsheet. This system allows researchers to search for any one record.
The process to find these ancestors wasn’t easy before the records were digitized. On a 2018 trip to Ukraine, Snyder experienced how difficult it was to navigate the archives.
“It was hard to get records,” he recalled. “You could check out four books at a time, and you had to know which ones you wanted.”
In addition, the records are either in Cyrillic — the alphabet used by many Slavic people — or a combination of Cyrillic and Hebrew. Snyder had a translator who could help decipher the texts.
“[The archives] only stayed open for like four hours during the day,” he said. “It was really impossible to be able to do research at the archives, but now that they scan things, and the archivists really want to protect things from the war effort, [the process of finding one’s ancestry is simpler].”
Learning about his family history was compelling for Snyder, who learned the Ukrainian towns in which his ancestors had lived and even the synagogues they may have attended there.
“It’s just nice to know where you came from and what the people did, what they were like,” he said. “When I visited Eastern Europe, my goal wasn’t necessarily to find anything at the archives. … But I did visit all 19 towns that I knew I had family from and just walked around the towns.”
Snyder analyzed the topography of those towns and noted that each shared similarities to a region of the D.C. and Maryland area.
“Kremenets looks a lot like Hagerstown; Lutsk is very much like Rockville; Rudno is more like Bethesda,” Snyder said. “You can see the topography. You can see whether it’s a built-up city or it’s just a small town. That was my way of getting in touch with my ancestors. And if I can share that same thing with other people, it’s great.”
He encourages others to visit Eastern Europe to explore its storied Jewish history.
“I know it’s sad and depressing at some points, but you also get a feel for what the community looked like and where your family lived, because they lived there for three, four, 500 years,” Snyder said.
The impact of this expanded genealogical research extends beyond the D.C. area. Berenson said she received a “great, long email” recently from a Florida resident.
“He was thrilled he found a relative just a mile away from where he lives: a current cousin,” she recalled. “But he went on about other ancestors he found; he was very happy.”
Snyder feels the same.
“What is now available in 2025 that wasn’t available before — I’m a part of that story,” Snyder said.
