Why should you join IGRA?

Sometimes people ask us what the benefits of membership in IGRA are, and why they should join our association.

Becoming a member of IGRA supports our efforts to create new resources for Israeli genealogy. We are the only genealogy society indexing new databases of information based on sources from archives in Israel and abroad. Whether or not our current over 2 million records include brickwall-breaking information on your family, your support of IGRA ensures our ability to add the next million records and beyond.

Supporting IGRA ensures our ability to educate our members and the general public through live and online lectures. IGRA is proud to have provided a platform for some of the most celebrated genealogists around the world, both in our live lectures around Israel, and online through our Webinars and Show & Tell meetings.

IGRA is a volunteer-run organization. Membership funds our investment in creating content for our members now and in the future. This includes providing the local spaces we meet in, but more so the technology we use to make our databases and lectures available to a worldwide audience. IGRA’s web site has, from the very beginning of IGRA, been a centerpiece of our work. Much thought and effort went into creating it, and a lot of work goes into maintaining and growing it.

Insuring the continuous operation of our site is not as simple as may seem. While IGRA might not seem like a likely target for hackers and spammers, our web site actually gets attacked hundreds of times a day on average. We use a variety of services and techniques to insure that these attacks do not interrupt access to our site, but this is an ongoing and active process.

While there are immediate benefits of IGRA membership, including free access to our local meetings and discounts on our larger events, as well as access to the details of indexed records, document images in our database, we see membership dues as support for our efforts to make the contents of genealogically-relevant records in archives available to the wider public, to support our lectures and events, and to insure our association continues its growth year after year.

Supporting IGRA through membership is supporting the future of Israeli genealogy.

So please join IGRA and invest in it and the future.