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| Yizkor
Books (Memorial Books) Yizkor books are memorials to the Jewish communities destroyed in the Holocaust. Most often they were compiled by survivors from those communities and contain the history of the town or city, biographies of prominent people, information about the various Jewish organizations of the town such as the Zionist and Bundist movements, the local Jewish sports club, the Jewish schools, and lists of the people of the town who were killed in the Holocaust. The books contain many photographs, maps, personal reminiscences, charts, etc. The text is mostly in Yiddish and Hebrew but Russian, Polish or Hungarian are not uncommon. Many were published soon after the end of World War II, some even in the Displaced Persons camps that were established by the Allies to house the survivors. Yizkor books, however, continued to appear in a steady stream throughout the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s and are still being published, though in much smaller numbers. The model for yizkor books may have been the memorbuecher (community prayer books) once common in Jewish communities throughout Central Europe. These consisted of prayers, a list of deceased leaders, and a martyrology of people and places. The memorbuch—the first appeared in about 1600—reflected the religious life of the community and accompanied it in its tribulations and migrations. Though yizkor books were on the whole secular in nature, their compilers, like those of the memorbuecher, attempted to keep the history of their communities from being forgotten. The Yale University Library has a collection of over 500 yizkor books. They are cataloged by the name of the town, city or region that they memorialize. A list of the yizkor books at Yale can be found on the Judaica web site: (http://www.library.yale.edu/judaica/yizkor.html) |