JewAge — Genealogy Platform Development and Rebuild

JewAge is a multilingual Jewish history and genealogy platform developed for Am haZikaron, with approximately 20,000 users, 300,000 profiles, and 30,000 articles.

Original platform

I co-developed the original platform with another developer around 2008–2012. It was built on heavily customized Semantic MediaWiki, with Neo4j supporting relationship searches.

The site ran on a single server and was not responsive. Its extensive customizations made maintenance difficult and prevented MediaWiki upgrades. There was no active development after the original phase until work resumed in 2025.

Current rebuild

The new version uses Laravel, React, and PostgreSQL, with relational tables for the data and Elastic for search. It has a responsive interface and a modular architecture managed through Dokploy, designed to support deployment across multiple servers.

The aim is to provide a more maintainable foundation for the platform’s continued development.

My contribution

I initially handled most of the rebuild myself. As more developers joined, my role became hands-on team lead: I continue developing the application while managing the development team.

Original development: approximately 2008–2012
Current rebuild: 2025–present
Status: New version in development

Figures describe the overall JewAge platform and are approximate.