Finding Hebrew Fonts

Even though I live in Israel, my computer operating system runs using English, and almost all the work I do is in English. That said, I occasionally have the need to do some work in Hebrew, which presents some problems. One problem is that I don't have a lot of Hebrew fonts on my computer, and usually whatever project I'm working on requires something slightly different (requiring me to find an appropriate font).

For genealogists, one use for Hebrew, even for those who do not speak Hebrew, is to transcribe the exact text on Jewish gravestones, which are frequently partially (and sometimes completely) in Hebrew. When publishing books on your family history, having the right fonts to publish those transcriptions can be very important. Another use is transcribing family letters written in Yiddish (Yiddish uses the Hebrew alphabet). By the way, if you do want to transcribe Yiddish, an interest tool online is called the Yiddish Typewriter and it lets you enter Yiddish in various forms, and it then outputs it into many more forms (including YIVO transcription, IPA transcription, PDF, Image (GIF, etc.) – it looks quite useful.

In this post I'm going to share some places you can find Hebrew fonts. Most of the sites I'm going to point out have free fonts, although I'll also include a few commercial sites. Keep in mind I'm not going to explain how to use these fonts on your computer, that will have to be in a different post.

So first, I should point out that there are different ways to divide Hebrew fonts, and I'll take a look at a few.

First, Hebrew fonts can be divided into three categories:

1) Fonts that support Nikudot (vowels) and Taamim (cantillation marks - also called Trop in Yiddish)

2) Fonts that support Nikudot (vowels) but do not support Taamim

3) Fonts that support neither Nikudot nor Taamim

A few things about these categories:

Category 1 is essentially only needed when one is reproducing a biblical passage, and not always. Taamim (cantillation marks) are used to show the reader of a passage how to pronounce that passage when reading it aloud in synagogue. There are other interpretations of the Taamim, but they are beyond the scope of this post.

Category 2 includes Hebrew vowels, which unlike in English, are not letters, but diacritical marks. In modern Israeli Hebrew, these vowels are usually not used. You won't, for example, see them in most books or newspapers. Newspapers published for people new to Hebrew (such as immigrants to Israel) use vowels, as it makes it easier to read the Hebrew (one doesn't need to figure out the word based on context). This is a niche market. Vowels are also frequently used in the publication of Hebrew prayer books. That said, if you plan on printing something in Hebrew that is going to be read by someone not fully fluent in Hebrew, including vowels is a good idea.

Category 3 is the largest category of fonts. Most modern Hebrew fonts will fall into this category, not only because Israelis don't use vowels, but because implementing vowels as diacritical marks is a pain in the neck for font designers.

Here's an example of Hebrew text with both Nikudot and Taamim:

Nikudot (Vowels) in Blue, Taamim (Cantillation Marks) in Red

This is a passage from Exodus Chapter 7 - roughly translated as "and the river will swarm with frogs, which will go up and come into your houses". The font is called Taamey Frank CLM, part of the free Culmus font collection I mention below. The text with Nikudot and Taamim came from the Mechon Mamre web site.

As you can imagine, designing fonts that take into consideration the proper placement of all of those marks is complicated. Considering that Hebrew has the history it does, there are still many uses for fonts with Nikudot (vowels) and Taamim (cantillation marks). Recently, a new English edition of the Talmud has been started called the Koren Talmud Bavli, which is the first Talmud that I'm aware of that includes the full text of the Talmud with Nikudot in the standard Vilna page layout.

Like in English, there are also serif and san-serif fonts – and like English, sans-serif fonts are generally perceived as more modern. There are also monospaced fonts.

There are also handwriting fonts, and fonts in alternate Hebrew alphabet forms like Rashi Script (which was not used by Rashi, nor is it really script).

You might find handwriting fonts that include Nikudot, but I doubt you'd ever see one with Taamim since it's a printing mark, and not generally handwritten.

Warning on using old Hebrew fonts

One more point worth making is that fonts in Hebrew were previously available in many formats that didn't work well together. Windows had one kind, Macintosh had another, and each went through different versions that didn't work even on the same platform. There are different ways of displaying Hebrew on the Internet as well, called visual and logical Hebrew. Visual Hebrew is the older format, still used on many Israeli sites. Logical Hebrew is the now standard format, which should be used by everyone. Old fonts were also encoded in different character encodings (like ISO-8859-1, ISO-8859-8, ISO-8859-8-i, or Windows-1255) instead of the more modern Unicode encoding formats (like UTF-8). I bring all of this up to point out that if you are scouring the net looking for Hebrew fonts, be careful not to install old fonts which might not use the latest standards. Look for fonts that mention Unicode, UTF-8 or UTF-16. If you have old Hebrew fonts on your computer – consider replacing them if they use one of these older formats – because even if they work on your computer you probably won't be able to share whatever you create with anyone else.

Okay, that all said, where do you get Hebrew fonts?

If you have no Hebrew fonts and want to get a variety of fonts quickly, there are two sites which have collected free Hebrew fonts and bundled them together for download.

The first is the Open Siddur Project, which has a Font Pack which includes 8 fonts with Nikudot and Taamim, 14 fonts with Nikudot, and 46 other Hebrew fonts (without Nikudot or Taamim). Note that all of these fonts are free and in Unicode format so you know they will work on modern computers and are interchangeable with other people. There is a PDF available that shows samples of all the fonts in the font pack. A few examples from the PDF:

A selection of fonts from the Open Siddur Project's Font Pack

The second is from The Bold Edge | Jewish Design Central, which has a Free Hebrew Font Collection. I'm not sure how many fonts are in this collect or what kinds there are, but it includes 50 different font files (although some may be in the same font family). I've requested they put together a PDF showing which fonts are included, so hopefully they will add that eventually.

Next, there is the Culmus Project whose goal it is to provide free Hebrew fonts for use with Linux and Unix systems. Even so, these fonts should work on Windows and Mac as well. There are 14 font families includes currently (full list - lists Latin counterpart fonts when they exist). In addition to some standard fonts that are serif, sans-serif and monospaced, they also have display fonts (Fancy) and fonts that include all the Nikudot and Taamim (Taamey). The Taamey fonts are downloadable individually, but for the rest, you need to download a file from their download page (at the top you should see a link right next to the text "Looking for the latest version?" and that's the file you need.

One interesting font is called Alef. It's a new font designed from the ground up to be used for both Hebrew and English, and on the web. I don't see any reason it can't be used in print as well. It's a free font licensed under the SIL Open Font License (see below). It was designed by a group of Israeli designers including Mushon Zer-Aviv, Michal Sahar and HaTayas (Danny Meirav) who together make up the HaGilda font foundry, and Nir Yenni. One of it's intentions is to replace Arial as the default choice for Hebrew web sites.

Scholarly Fonts

Another source of fonts worth nothing are those developed by different organizations for use by biblical scholars.

The first is Ezra SIL which was developed by SIL International, a non-profit organization that carries out linguistics training and research globally, and is based on the font used in the BHS (Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia)  The font is Unicode and contains Nikudot and Taamim. There are actually two versions of the font, Ezra SIL and Ezra SIL SR, the difference being in the style of Taamim. The regular Ezra SIL follows the format of the BHS, while Ezra SIL SR follows a more traditional (in Jewish usage) rounded style of Taamim.

Ezra SIL fonts also support OpenType, and take advantage of some OpenType features like ligatures (aleph-lamed ligature) and positioning to position the Nikudot and Taamim better. To use OpenType features, you need a program that supports them (such as Word 2010 and later on Windows, Mellel on Mac, or Adobe InDesign). There is something else special about the Ezra SIL fonts – they are open source. They use a license called the SIL Open Font License. You can freely modify them and re-distribute your changes (however, you can't use the world Ezra or SIL in the new font). This has led to other Hebrew fonts based on Ezra SIL.

An example of new fonts that derive from Ezra SIL are the Shlomo Fonts. These fonts are modified from Ezra SIL SR, and change some of the letters to make them easier to read. Some letters in Hebrew are very similar (ד/ר and נ/ג for example). Shlomo Fonts try to modify these similar letters so they are more easily distinguishable at first glance. An example of the difference:

Note the difference between the second letter from right (ג) in each font

Another font designed for academics is Cardo, designed by David J. Perry. It also uses the SIL Open Font License, although it is not, as far as I can tell, derived from Ezra SIL (although possibly the Hebrew part is). The font also includes Greek and Latin characters. This font is still being refined, and new versions do occasionally come out (the last released version was in 2011). Cardo is also an OpenType font. Cardo actually comes with a 57-page PDF user manual, which is useful to read if you want to get the most out of the font. The manual is included in the font file download.

Another academic Hebrew font is SBL Hebrew. SBL Hebrew is also Unicode and supports OpenType features. It also has a PDF user manual, which is 23 pages long. It seems that to some extant SBL Hebrew is positioned as a newer more advanced version of Ezra SIL. Indeed, it seems Ezra SIL and SBL Hebrew share at least one creator in common, John Hudson. Unlike Ezra SIL and Cardo, SBL Hebrew is not licensed under an Open Font License, but is freely usable for non-commercial purposes. For commercial use, it can be licensed from Tiro Typeworks.

Commercial Fonts

Some commercial font foundries that sell Hebrew fonts include Ascender and Adobe (Adobe's Myriad Hebrew is particularly interesting because it is a large set of Hebrew fonts that match up with the much-used Myriad Pro font in English). There are several Israeli foundries like Masterfont (see them also on MyFonts.com or fonts.com in English interfaces), and FontBit (I can't find them on an English site). There is also a site called Webmaster.org.il (in Hebrew) that collects fonts from many smaller type designers around Israel and links to them.

There are several Jewish software companies (I mean Jewish in that their software is Jewish-oriented) that offer Hebrew fonts. Davka offers a set of 116 Unicode Hebrew fonts called Hebrew Font Portfolio. Unfortunately, none of them support Nikudot. Davka also offers a set of 30 fonts that do include Nikudot and Taamim called Hebrew Font Gallery Deluxe. I'm not clear if these are Unicode or not. Kabbalah Software offers K-Fonts Collections with various types of Hebrew fonts like Body Text,  Calligraphy, Design, Headline, Invitation, etc. They are all Unicode, however for some reason they are listed as working on Windows only. Definitely do not buy their 'Classic Mac' fonts which are not unicode and will not work properly on modern systems. The site looks a little out-of-date, so I'm not sure if this is an active company.

Hebrew-ish

One last thing, there is a class of fonts which are not Hebrew at all, but for lack of a better term I'll call Hebrew-ish. They are English fonts that use Hebrew letters that are repositioned, flipped, warped, whatever to make them into English letters. In other words, you can type in English and get English words that look vaguely Hebrew. This is a gimmick popular for graphics for Jewish events, etc. I'm not recommending this, I just thought it was interesting that there is a whole class of fonts like this. There are many fonts like this (probably more than a dozen easy to find). Below you can see four of them – Jerusalem, Peace, Shalom, and Ben Zion:

"Hebrew-ish" Fonts

I hope this post was useful. If you have other good Hebrew font resources, please share them in the comments. I hope to follow this up soon with an explanation of how to get Hebrew working on your computer, including a neat trick for using Hebrew with Adobe InDesign without having to shell out the extra money for the Middle East edition.

International Jewish Genealogy Conference in Boston

Once a year the the IAJGS partners with a local Jewish genealogy society to have the International Jewish Genealogy Conference. Last year it was in Paris. The year before it was in Washington, DC (where I spoke about Utilizing Belgian Archives for Jewish Research). This year, in partnership with the JGS of Greater Boston, it will be in my hometown, Boston.

The conference is taking place at the Boston Park Plaza Hotel, and will be from August 4-9. This is same place that the conference was held the last time the conference was held in Boston back in 1996. The hotel is in an amazing location for those who have never been to Boston. There are tons of things to do and see within walking distance of the hotel, from the historic district in Boston (Freedom Trail), to the first public park in America (Boston Common), to the shopping district (Newbury Street).

There is a special conference rate at the hotel, available for up to two weeks before the conference in case you want to show up early and tour. To get the conference rate, you can book through the conference web site, until July 11.

For those who have never been to the annual conference before, IAJGS has put together a video on what you can expect:

If you've never been to one of the annual conferences, I highly recommend it. You're sure to learn a lot, meet lots of people, and make connections with people and groups that are researching the same places and families you are researching.

Registration is now open, with an early registration discount available through April 30, 2013. One other date worth mentioning is that all additions to the conference Family Finder must be submitted by July 1, 2013. The Family Finder is a directory of family names and ancestral towns that are being researched by attendees at the conference. The top five names and towns can be displayed on your conference badge, and up to eight names will be put into the Family Finder book that is distributed at the conference.

Useful Document for Researching Belgian Immigrants to US

Antwerp Baggage Disinfection Room
"Everything for passengers is done free of charge in this building."

I recently discovered a document on the web site of the Felix Archives (the Antwerp city archives) called Emigration to America (this is a PDF). It seems to date back to 1999, but is still useful, especially considering no documents newer than 75 years ago are available anyways, and this document lists what documents exist in archives related to people living in Antwerp that may have emigrated to the US. The document was put together by the Archivist of the City of Antwerp. The availability dates mentioned are certainly out of date - for example it refers to certain collections available up to 1915, but those collections are now available to at least 1930 if not later. This is because as time goes on, more records are made publicly available.

Some of the interesting records mentioned in the document include registers from hotels and boarding houses, and emigration lists of third-class passengers from 1892 forward (second-class and first-class passengers were not recorded in these registers because American immigration restriction did not apply to them).

Some of the archives mentioned in the document include:

• Antwerp City Archives (Stadsarchief Antwerpen)
• Provincial Archives Antwerp (Provinciaal Archief Antwerpen)
• National Archives Antwerp (Rijksarchief Antwerpen)
• National Archives Beveren (Rijksarchief Beveren)
• National Archives of Belgium, Brussels (Algemeen Rijksarchief Brussel)
• Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Brussels (Archief van het Ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken, Brussel)
• National Archives, The Hague (Algemeen Rijksarchief Den Haag)
• Rotterdam Municipal Archives (Gemeentearchief Rotterdam)

as well as these in the US:

• National Archives and Records Administration
• Ellis Island
• National Archives Regional Center in New York
• New York Municipal Archives

and these genealogy societies:

• Flemish Association for Family Research
• (Vlaamse Vereniging voor Familiekunde)
• Netherlands Genealogical Association

Keep in mind that some of the documents mentioned as being in specific archives (in 1999) are now in different archives. In particular the central immigrant police files are now in the National Archives in Brussels.

Database of Polish Victims of the Nazis

There's an interesting database listing Polish victims of the Nazis, organized by a group of Polish government and non-government organizations, and sponsored mainly by Polish media organizations.

The site is connected to three Polish organizations: the Institute of National Remembrance, the Foundation for Polish-German Reconciliation, and the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. It is also sponsored by a number of Polish media organizations, including the Polish Press Agency and several Polish TV stations.

The site, Straty.pl, is unfortunately only available in Polish. Luckily, it's not too hard to use without knowledge of Polish, especially if you use Google Chrome and the built-in Translate feature. Even without Translate, you can get around the site. This is what the search page looks like:

Straty.pl Search Page

A quick translation of the fields:

Nazwisko (Surname)

Imię (Given name)

Imię ojca (Father's name)

Imię matki (Mother's name)

Miejsce urodzenia (Place of birth)

Data urodzenia (Day of birth)

Data śmierci (Day of death)

dzień (day)

miesiąc (month)

rok (year)

SZUKAJ is Search, and CZYSC is Clear.

You can search for a surname alone, but apparently not a town alone. If a surname has too many hits, it will force you to fill in additional search fields to help pare down the umber of results.

Victims listed in the database include Polish soldiers who were killed, prisoners of war, resistance fighters, concentration camp prisoners, those persecuted for reasons of race (aka Jews and Gypsies), those executed by the Nazis, those sentenced to death by German courts, slave laborers, displaced persons, children, civilian casualties (such as from bombing raids), etc.

This list is not exclusively, nor even predominately, Jewish. The site was not set up as a memorial to Jewish victims of the Nazis, but rather as a database of Polish victims of the Nazis, some of which happened to be Jewish. In fact, one looking at the site might wonder if Jewish names in the database are more of an afterthought than a primary section of the database.

There are many sources of data in the database, and each listing will tell you which source they came from, which can help you track down further information. Data sources I've noticed include:

International Tracing Service (Bad Arolsen) (http://www.its-arolsen.org/)

Jewish Historical Institute (http://www.jhi.pl/)

Polish Red Cross (http://www.pck.pl/)

State Archive in Krakow (http://www.ank.gov.pl/)

Obviously this database is not complete, and it's not going to be 100% accurate (and certainly not complete when it comes to Jewish names). It is still useful to supplement the other existing databases out there, and to give you some direction on possible research routes. For example, if you see records from the International Tracing Service, you can contact them to get more information on the person you find.

You can also contribute data to the database, although I have not tried to do this. They have a questionnaire that you can fill out on individuals, listing their name, parents' names, birth date and location, nationality, religion, place of residence before the war, education, occupation, political organization membership, social activities, etc. This is, unfortunately like the rest of the site, only available in Polish. I'm not sure what would happen if you filled out the form in English.

Of course, when searching for information on Jewish victims of the Nazis, the most important database is the Yad Vashem Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names. One important distinction between these databases, beside Straty.pl's focus on Poles and Yad Vashem's focus on Jews (with obvious overlap), is that Straty.pl's database contains victims who are not necessarily people who were killed. Prisoners of camps, etc. even if they were not murdered, are contained in their database.

For example, the database includes two people with the surname Trauring, the couple Ferdynand and Stefania Trauring, who I know to appear on Shindler's lists. They show up in the Straty.pl database as prisoners of the Gross-Rosen sub-camp in Brunnlitz, which happens to be where prisoners working in Oskar Schindler's factory were interned. Whether this couple survived the war or not, they are listed in the Straty.pl database as having been prisoners. That's an important distinction.