JRI-Poland
organization
JRI-Poland, also known as Jewish Records Indexing-Poland, is an online resource for Jewish genealogists searching for Jewish vital records for the current and former territories of Poland.
History
JRI-Poland was founded in 1995 by genealogists Stanley M. Diamond, and Michael Tobias, and Steven Zedeck. Diamond was researching the Beta Thalassemia genetic trait, which he suspected was present in Ashkenazi Jewish families in his family tree.
In February 2013, a historic agreement was negotiated between JRI-Poland and the Polish State Archives to make more records available in digitized form.
In 2014, JRI-Poland was instrumental in the Finding Your Roots episode featuring the family history of Alan Dershowitz, Carole King, and Tony Kushner according to Josh Gleason, producer, who said that the program was able to provide information about the subject's 3rd and 4th ancestors that would otherwise have been unavailable except for the work of JRI-Poland.
In 2016, records found in the JRI-Poland databases provided confirmation of Holocaust survivor Yisrael Kristal being the oldest living man.
“JRI-Poland” enters the record as organization. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what JRI-Poland and organization can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“JRI-Poland” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, JRI-Poland and organization provides the most credible route into that argument.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q24589889. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1995, 2013, 2014 and 2016.
Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
- Event chronology
- Institutional context
- Locating named record creators
Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “JRI-Poland”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow JRI-Poland primary sources, JRI-Poland archive and JRI-Poland research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “JRI-Poland”?
- Who created the surviving record, and for what administrative purpose?
- What chronology connects this entry to wider political or social change?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “JRI-Poland” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.