New AI Tools for Jewish Genealogy
Guest Speaker: Jan Gronski.
The L’Dor V’Dor Foundation is building first-of-kind AI models that read and transcribe historic Yiddish handwriting and other languages common in Jewish records. In the first part of this video, Jan Gronski demystifies the process of training Handwritten Text Recognition in Transkribus.
In the second part, he demonstrates PastPort, an interactive map built on the largest online database of Jewish surnames and Jewish towns that places your ancestors with their town neighbours. PastPort is being developed in the LDVDF AI Lab and is due for release in early 2026.
Jan Gronski is DoJR Technology Advisor. He is a career technologist who most recently led the regional research and development engineering center of global networking giant Cisco systems in Shanghai, China. With more than 25 years of experience in the networking industry as a hands-on developer and engineering executive, Gronski is fluent in Polish (his native language), English, and Chinese; possesses good reading, writing and spoken comprehension of Russian, German, and Spanish; and has basic comprehension of French and Turkish. He is a key volunteer for Jewish Records Indexing – Poland. Gronski earned his undergraduate degree in mathematics at the University of Warsaw and PhD in mathematics at University of Illinois.
This event was held on Sunday, 16 November 2025