How a new tool in Lithuania helps people read letters from their Jewish ancestors

SEPTEMBER 10, 2026 16:32At a family reunion in California in 2013, Felicita Trueblood discovered a portal to the past: a binder full of letters from her great-grandfather, a rabbi in Ukraine, from before World War II.As exciting as the discovery was, the letters were illegible to her - until now, thanks to an artificial intelligence tool developed by Sergii Gurbych, a researcher in Lithuania who hungered for information about his own Jewish past. They unveiled a world of grief but also brought Trueblood solace, uncovering the truth about her great-grandfather’s death.The letters, about 50 pages in total, had sat untouched for decades in her cousin’s house in Palm Springs. They were penned in Yiddish by Pavel Malisoff, Trueblood’s great-grandfather in Konotop, Ukraine - then in the Soviet Union - to his son, Trueblood’s great-uncle Solomon, who immigrated to the United States and changed his last name to Malis.Between 1927 and 1934, the letters bridged two worlds - on one side, a father in Ukraine witnessing a community on the brink of destruction, and on the other, a son journeying from New York to California under the weight of the Great Depression. Malis died in 1985. For nearly a century, no one else read those pages.At the 2013 reunion, none of the living family members could decipher their ancestor’s Yiddish letters, written in Hebrew script. Trueblood, who is now 75, felt compelled to take charge of the treasure trove. She grew up in San Diego with few traces of her Jewish past. Her mother, Malisoff’s granddaughter, became a Christian Scientist before marrying her father, a non-Jewish descendant of colonial Americans. Trueblood wanted to know who her great-grandfather was and the life he inhabited, long cut off from her family memory.Sergii Gurbych stands in the Center for East European Jewish History at Vilnius University. (credit: Shira Li Bartov/JTA)“I was raised outside the Jewish community, with no day-to-day connection,” Trueblood told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “But I was always fascinated.”Trueblood soon ran into obstacles. She found only a handful of translators who could help decipher the handwritten letters, and the cost of hiring them to work through the whole stack was prohibitively high.VILNISH turns handwritten Hebrew, Yiddish letters into digital textBut 13 years after inheriting the letters, she saw a Facebook post about VILNISH, a new project in Lithuania that aims to turn handwritten and historical printed texts in Yiddish and Hebrew into digital texts that can be easily searched and translated.Gurbych, a researcher at Vilnius University’s Center for the Study of East European Jewish History, built the AI model behind VILNISH, which launched late last year. Born in Ukraine, Gurbych studied Hebrew and Yiddish alongside electrical engineering. At Vilnius University, he focuses on developing digital approaches to analyzing archival Jewish texts.Gurbych is particularly interested in texts written between World War I and World War II, when Jewish cultural and intellectual life flourished in Vilnius. In 1925, Vilnius became the first headquarters of the Yiddish Scientific Institute, or YIVO, which continues to preserve the Yiddish language and Eastern European Jewish heritage in New York City.Gurbych turned to a wealth of diaries, memoirs, and other documents written by Jews in the interwar period and stored in the National Library of Lithuania. They provided the perfect material to teach a language model to recognize handwritten texts from the period. As he trains VILNISH on more and more handwriting types, it becomes a more universal tool.Soon after Gurbych publicized the service, he began to hear from people like Trueblood, who sought to read letters left behind by their relatives.Their urge to connect with the past was familiar to Gurbych. His own grandfather was a Jew born in 1915 in the Polish city of Łódź. During the Holocaust, he escaped the Łódź Ghetto days before its liquidation by the Nazis, when most of the 67,000 Jews who lived there were killed. Gurbych’s grandfather settled in present-day Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union. Gurbych is drawn to pieces of writing that evoke the atmosphere, the tastes and smells of life for Jews in Poland before their communities were destroyed.“I want to know more about the world where my grandfather lived,” said Gurbych. “He died in 2001, and I just feel that I didn’t speak with him about this time enough. He was a person who lived in the Soviet Union, so he was just closed, and didn’t very much like to talk about his Jewish background and about life in interwar Poland.”Trueblood contacted Gurbych in May. Within a month, he sent her translations of all her great-grandfather’s letters. She was stunned by the vivid images of Malisoff’s life in Konotop, marked by poverty and separation. All of his 11 children were forced to relocate across the Soviet Union or immigrate to Canada and the United States.Konotop was racked by famine during Stalin’s rapid forced collectivization of agriculture. Malisoff described “people walking half naked, hungry, with only a few coins in their pockets, without a piece of bread, without proper clothing, silently, without work and without money.” The “spiritual condition” was destroyed, he wrote, as the Sabbath, the holidays, kosher food, circumcisions and religious teaching disappeared - “as though they had never existed.”It wasn’t just an AI language model that supplied her these windows to the past, said Trueblood. Gurbych had the knowledge of Jewish history and religious tradition to explain the terms her great-grandfather, a rabbi, used and to point her toward the stories and texts he referenced.“What I got back was just beautiful, because he understands the context, the history, the biblical references,” she said.Trueblood discovers through VILNISH how her great-grandfather diedShe also made a discovery that shifted her understanding of how her great-grandfather died. Trueblood and her other living relatives knew that Malisoff had been tortured by Stalin’s regime for receiving small packages of money from family members in California. They always believed that was how he died.But after the letters from Malisoff stopped abruptly in 1934, other letters from his wife and children revealed the truth: Malisoff had died not from torture, but from a heart attack at 74. A letter from one of his children in the Soviet Union gave Trueblood the unexpected gift of her great-grandfather’s dignified death and memorial service.“Our old father of blessed memory has passed away, but his good and beautiful name has not died,” the letter said. “It lives on, and will continue to live for many years. The town paid him the highest honors. The entire town, old and young alike, accompanied him on his final journey, and he was given the place of highest honor in accordance with his good deeds.”Gurbych hopes that VILNISH will retrieve such memories for many more people like Trueblood, while also helping academic researchers who face huge sets of archival documents in Yiddish and Hebrew that few people can read.The tool also has the potential to support the descendants of Jews who were persecuted during the Holocaust as they prepare materials to confirm their eligibility for repatriation or citizenship, such as synagogue records, internal rolls of Jewish communities, and other historical documents.Trueblood was struck by how many others have yet to access threads to their past, as stacks of paper like hers sit untouched in attics and libraries.“These letters are all over the world,” she said. “There are thousands of them out there that haven’t been translated.”Follow us on Google