Jews have been living in Maine since the mid-1800s. There were properly functioning Jewish communities in Bangor since the 1840s and in Portland since the 1880s. In the last 100 years, the Jewish population of Maine has ranged from 5,000 to 10,000. The Documenting Maine Jewry History project seeks to collect short histories on the many individuals and organizations which, over the years, have made a contribution to the Jewish history of Maine.

The Documenting Old Maine Jewry (DOMJ) database itself is now in its third year. The DOMJ database has records on over 20,000 Jewish Mainers in some 90 towns and cities . This immediately raises two questions : who is a Jew and who is a Mainer. On the former the project has not taken any position. On the latter we have taken a very wide definition to include not only those who were born here, those who grew up and lived here, but also those who are buried here.

The methodology DOMJ uses is basically a jigsaw approach. We take whatever community, official, and cemetery records we can get and merge them into a common database. The resulting problems of incompleteness and duplication are very difficult for us. As a rule of thumb we only name-match when we have at least two common facts for a given name. Our feeling is that it is better to have duplicate records then to put together information on two people who just happen to have the same first and last names. Jews and certain families just love to repeat names. The only long-term fix is to beg families to supplement / correct their information using the on-line edit function (on each person's page) or by emailing info directly to dopj@mindspring.com .

For security reasons, complete access to the database is available only on request. A full index of all burials , however, is publically available

Last Updated : 13 May 2008