Since there are so many Lefkowitz families, it often has been necessary to confine the genealogical search to the last known shtetl of one's Lefkowitz ancestors. Even then, particularly if the town is large, there could be many unrelated Lefkowitz families. Searching for, say, Abram Lefkowitz is a daunting proposition. Such a search produces many, many results with no way of knowing which ones are your relatives or ancestors. The goal of the LEFKOWITZ surname project is to identify the various Lefkowitz families (and variants of the name) and trace their ancestry.

In addition, we would like to shed some light on the source of the surname. It is not clear that all Lefkowitz surnames and variants were derived from the same name. In some cases, a variant name may have developed from Lev (lion); in other cases, the name may have developed from Levak (left-handed).