One night at the beginning of the Covid pandemic, Ilana Sinclair lay awake worrying about the many older adults who might pass away before having a chance to tell their life stories.

“I felt that someone needed to help them turn their stories into something compelling and meaningful for their families,” she recalled.

Sinclair has a master’s in social work and professional experience as a fundraiser and marketing director for Jewish nonprofits in Los Angeles and in Israel, where she moved with her family in 2010. She relied on both career tracks to launch the boutique memoir-writing agency Capture Your Story.

There are other businesses that offer personal memoir products—for example, another Israeli outfit, DocYourStory, produces filmed memoirs. Capture Your Story, however, offers some unique elements, beginning with its one-on-one interviews conducted over Zoom. Then there’s the Jewish sensibility Sinclair’s seven-person team of writers, editors and graphic designers, all native English-speakers living in Israel, brings to projects.

“The majority of our clients are Jewish, about half in America and half in Israel,” Sinclair said. “Because we are all Jewish, we can relate to Jewish stories in a way that puts people at ease.”

Myra Waisbord Treitel of Arizona, a Hadassah life member, said she had been trying unsuccessfully for 40 years to record the Holocaust survival story of her father, Jacob Israel Waisbord. After her 80th birthday two years ago, she reached out to Capture Your Story.

“Originally, it was just going to be my father’s story,” Treitel said, “but I ended up doing six Zoom hours—two about my father, two about my mother and two about me.”

Her 131-page book includes narratives and images, such as facsimiles of her father’s visas from his long journey out of Europe. “It is a masterpiece,” Treitel said. “It was the best gift I could give myself and my children and grandchildren.”

Clients also receive PDFs of their books and recordings of their Zoom interviews and can purchase an optional video mini biography.

“With antisemitism rising around the world,” Sinclair said, “it feels more important than ever to have that connection to identity and pride in your heritage, to feel strengthened by the people who lived before you and the challenges they overcame.”

For her part, Sinclair said she is equally passionate about passing along to her four children the remarkable backstories of their ancestors, including her paternal grandmother, Barbi Weinberg, a trailblazer in the Los Angeles and national Jewish communal world who made Sinclair a Hadassah life member at her birth. 

Jordana Benami