Search Moroccan Jewish Cemeteries
A good name is better than fine oil - Kohelet 7:1 - קהלת ז:א
Yahasra.org · 2023–2026 · v8.13
Preserving Moroccan Jewish memory
A digital archive of every grave we can find, in every language we can write.
Our mission
Yahasra.org is the largest digital archive dedicated to Morocco's Jewish cemeteries, with over 32,050 burial records across 37 communities, from Tangier to the Sahara. A labor of memory, built so that the names engraved in stone are never lost to time.
The project is built on a simple principle: every name counts, every phonetic root connects. When a different spelling has hidden a family link for generations, our MJPN engine ties the threads back together.
What we do
Yahasra is more than a list of names. It is a research platform with a layered pipeline that turns photographs of gravestones into searchable, linked, multilingual records.
MJPN v3.5.2 phonetic engine
A domain-specific algorithm that unifies surname spellings across French, Spanish, Arabic and Hebrew transliterations into a single phonetic root, so AKNIN, OUAKNINE and WAKNIN all surface the same family.
Name Origins v2 — RAG in 5 languages
Every surname has a scholarly article assembled by retrieving from 8 data sources joined on the phonetic root (burials, AIU students, Beider, Laredo, onomastics, rabbi graves, variant geography), then drafted by Haiku 4.5 and proof-read by Sonnet 4.6, with mandatory APA citations.
Onomastic-dictionary integration
Direct vision-based ingestion of Beider 2017 and Laredo 1978, the two canonical references for Moroccan-Jewish surname scholarship, so the AI articles draw on real published linguistics rather than guesswork.
Stats v2 — live community portraits
A second-generation statistics engine producing community-by-community portraits, location quotients on canonical names, and a thirty-three-section yearly report exported as PDF or DOCX.
Photo + AI pipeline
Photographs of gravestones are run through a vision pipeline that reads Hebrew and Latin epitaphs, extracts dates (with pyluach-based Hebrew calendar conversion) and produces structured records ready for the database.
Histoire des Juifs du Maroc
A four-language scholarly edition (English, French, Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic) of the historical reference work, presented side-by-side with the burial records that document the communities it describes.
How to contribute
Can't find your loved one? Send us a photo of the gravestone along with any details you have. Your contribution helps preserve our shared heritage.
WhatsApp: +972-55-298-2563 · contact@yahasra.org
The team
Yahasra.org is a research project founded and led by Dr. Yohanan Ouaknine, in collaboration with field volunteers, family contributors and the OIS team.
Special thanks to IGRA (the Israel Genealogy Research Association) for collaboration on the Alliance student registers; to Alexander Beider and Abraham Laredo (posthumously) for the foundational scholarship in Sephardic onomastics that powers our Name Origins articles.