Announcing Zayt: a new tool for Czech archival research

From Abe Jellinek

I’m very excited to announce Zayt, a new interface for Czech Jewish records.

Zayt functions as an alternative to VadeMeCum; it has a modern reading interface, backwards compatibility with Badatelna and VadeMeCum links, PDF downloads, powerful search filters, and collaborative features (comments now, with support for transcriptions/annotations coming soon).

It's also a full backup of the Czech National Archives’ Jewish register collections. All of the documents are hosted on Zayt’s own servers, so we can take some pressure off of nacr.cz while offering features like downloads that were presumably too expensive for them to justify. (The storage provider I went with doesn’t charge for download bandwidth, so that isn’t an issue.)

More information: https://zayt.org/
Try it out on a book of birth records: https://zayt.org/collections/jewish-registers-1784-1949/n-930
And the corresponding index: https://zayt.org/collections/jewish-registers-1784-1949/n-940

It’s free and will always remain free. Registration is optional, only necessary if you want to save favorites (bookmarks) or leave comments.

If you find bugs or data issues or have wishlist items that you’ve always wanted archive sites like this to implement, please get in touch! Email me at abe@.... Let me know what you think, and I hope you find this new tool helpful in your research.

Best,
Abe