New York – Family Tree Web Site Seeks to Unite Jews Worldwide

New York – In the near future, provided Dan Rolls realizes his vision, any Jew in the world could easily visit a Web site where he would be able trace back his genealogical tree in a way that would show him his or her family connections with thousands of relatives he had never known about across the globe.

Rolls and his partners at Famillion believe that they need 300,000 Jews – a figure that constitutes 2 percent of the Jewish people – to upload their genealogical tree. So far, Famillion’s servers have received the genealogical tree of 70,000.

The question now is not only whether the technology will deliver what Rolls and other expect from it, but also whether the users will want to know what this method has to offer. Would a Hassidic Jew really want to find out that he has a cousin who converted to Christianity and became Catholic? Would he want to have this information available to everyone online?

“It’s a tool that potentially could have a lot of power,” said a Jewish Agency official involved with Famillion. “But I’m not sure it could help bring people who are not interested in their Judaism closer to it, and some people might not like to have their entire family history exposed on the Web.” [haaretz]