Pinkas Brody Model – 19th century Hebrew/Yiddish

Pinkas Brody – the community notebook of Brody (formerly in east Gallica, now in western Ukraine) contains various agreements between members of the Brody community between the years 1807–1817, including marriage agreements, inheritance, partnerships and dissolution of partnerships, sale and rental of houses, seats in the synagogue, and more. The handwriting is that of the community scribe and generally is clear and legible.

The pinkas was deciphered by Emanuel Elyasaf in 2023.

At the request of Ms. Marlis Glaser Humphrey, Dr. Sallyann Amdur Sack, and under the guidance of Mr. Jan M. Gronski all from L’Dor V’Dor and IAJGS, Emanuel uploaded the deciphered pinkas to Transkribus and built a model for Hebrew and Yiddish.

The pinkas comprises 158 pages with approximately 180,000 words. The text recognition model was built with a validation set of 10 percent of the trained data. Its CER and WER are 4.4 percent and 15.3 percent respectively.