Preservation · Verification · Permanence
"History fragmented them. Meron Foundation verifies them. Atesolate restores them."
Irreplaceable records of Jewish communities destroyed in the Holocaust exist today only in scattered archives, aging historians' files, and private collections — at high risk of permanent loss within one generation.
Atesolate is the digital home for the human record — a platform that preserves, verifies, and connects historical records, making them permanently accessible to descendants, scholars, and the public worldwide.
Every record on Atesolate is reviewed by a human archivist and, where verified against primary sources, certified with the Meron Foundation Seal of Emeth — the mark of historical truth.
Our Mission
Meron Foundation is dedicated to the preservation, digitization, verification, and permanent accessibility of the historical records of communities affected by genocide, persecution, and mass atrocity — with initial programmatic focus on European Jewish communities during the Holocaust era.
Through the Atesolate platform and the Meron Foundation Seal of Emeth certification program, the Foundation connects descendants, scholars, and the public with verified historical truth.
The Meron Foundation Seal of Emeth is awarded only after multi-stage human archivist review. No AI-generated content is ever certified. Certification is by human judgment only.
We do not collect individual records. We reconstruct entire communities — people, places, events, families, and stories — in their full historical context.
Data partnerships with Arolsen Archives, Yad Vashem, and YIVO Institute ensure every record is anchored to primary sources — not community submissions alone.
Direct descendants of the communities we preserve receive certification services at no charge. To be forgotten is the final injury. We refuse to charge for restoration of identity.
The Urgency
The historians who hold this knowledge are aging. The archives are deteriorating. The personal collections will not survive another generation without intervention. This is not a metaphor — it is a deadline.
What we preserve now will exist for centuries. What we fail to preserve will be lost forever.
The Name
Meron refers to Mt. Meron's narrow pass — the ancient road where, by tradition, every pilgrim was counted one by one. No soul anonymous. No person reduced to a number. This is the Foundation's covenant: every record is one person. Every person counted.
The Platform
Atesolate (atesolate.com) is the Foundation's proprietary digital platform — a portmanteau of atesorar (Spanish: to treasure, to value) and tessellate (to fit fragments into a pattern without gaps). We don't just archive. We atesolate.
Visit Atesolate.comPlatform currently in password-protected development. For access inquiries, contact us with your institutional affiliation.
A visitor, researcher, or descendant arrives and begins exploring community records
Documents, photographs, GEDCOM files, and testimonies are submitted through five ingestion paths
Automated processing: virus scan, OCR, transliteration, deduplication, and priority queue assignment
A human archivist reviews, assigns a trust tier, and makes the final determination — AI suggests, humans decide
Approved records go live — connected to a town, a family, and a timeline. A fragment becomes a whole story.
The Seal of Emeth (אמת — Hebrew for Truth) is awarded to records that have passed the Foundation's full verification pipeline: sources identified, archivist-reviewed, trust tier assigned, chain of evidence documented. Emeth — composed of the first, middle, and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet — represents a truth that is complete from beginning to end.
Founding Communities
Meron Foundation's work begins with three founding pilot communities in Germany and Lithuania — each representing a different dimension of European Jewish history before and during the Holocaust.
A small Thuringian town with nearly three centuries of continuous Jewish life. The synagogue was destroyed during Kristallnacht in November 1938. Stadtlengsfeld represents the depth and permanence of Jewish community in rural Germany — and the violence of its erasure.
Site of the Kaufering labor camp complex — eleven sub-camps connected to the Dachau system — where thousands of Jewish prisoners were worked to death. Landsberg represents the intersection of perpetrator infrastructure and victim identity in the heart of Bavaria.
A Lithuanian town where approximately 2,500 Jewish residents — nearly the entire Jewish community — were murdered at the Astravo forest in August and September 1941. Biržai represents the totality of Lithuanian Jewish destruction and the urgency of family-level documentation.
The Founders
Meron Foundation was founded by Michael R. Bien and Teresa A. Bien — a husband and wife who share the conviction that the work of the last generation is the most important generation of all.
Michael leads the Foundation's strategy, platform development, and institutional partnerships. His connection to the Biržai community through the Chait family lineage makes this work both personal and urgent — the kind of urgency that comes from knowing exactly what is at stake if we fail to act now.
Teresa leads program development, grant strategy, and the Foundation's community engagement initiatives. She oversees the town partnership program and guides the descendant engagement campaign — the work of ensuring that the families of those we document are the first to benefit from what we build.
Legal counsel: Webster, Chamberlain & Bean LLP · Washington DC · Hugh K. Webster, Esq.
Institutional Partners
Atesolate's verification standard depends on partnerships with the institutions that hold the primary sources. The following partnerships are in active development.
The world's most comprehensive archive on the victims and survivors of National Socialism — 30 million documents covering 17.5 million people. Data transfer partnership in development (Standard Contractual Clauses, EU-to-US).
arolsen-archives.org ↗The World Holocaust Remembrance Center — custodian of the Pages of Testimony, the Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names, and over 210 million pages of documents. Data partnership in development.
yadvashem.org ↗The world's preeminent center for Eastern European Jewish studies and the largest repository of materials on Jewish life in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. Data partnership in development.
yivo.org ↗Contact
Whether you are a historian, a researcher, a descendant, an institution, or a journalist — we want to hear from you. The Meron Foundation is built on the conviction that this work belongs to everyone who carries a stake in it.