Content area
Full Text
ABSTRACT
This article offers an introduction to the genre of community memorial volumes, also known as yizkor books (yisker-bikher in Yiddish, sifre zikaron in Hebrew). The authors provide an overview of the books' contents, along with an update on recent developments relating to their publication and dissemination.
INTRODUCTION
At the libraries of Yad Vashem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, as well as at a number of other institutions around the world, there are collections of books locked in glass-enclosed bookcases. Most often these publications do not circulate. They are treated like rare books, but more so because tiiieves have been known to steal them. They are the collections of yizkor books dedicated to the life and death of Eastern European Jewish communities. What wealth is stored in these books to make tiiem so valuable tiiat they are worth stealing? The purpose of this article is to explore that question by looking at the history of these books and by describing what information is included in them. This article serves as an introduction to the genre for new readers and provides an update on recent developments for those already familiar with it.
WHAT ARE YIZKOR BOOKS?
Yizkor books are texts written primarily by Holocaust survivors in their countries of resettlement, in conjunction with individuals who left their hometowns before the war. The books are referred to as yisker bikher or pinkeysim in Yiddish, Gedenkbücher in German, and sifre zikaron in Hebrew. Sefer seyfer in Yiddish), which means book in Hebrew and holy book in Yiddish, has also been used in the tides of some books. As soon as the survivors realized the great losses they suffered personally and as a people, they looked for a way to memorialize their relatives and neighbors and to describe the world in which they had lived prior to the Holocaust. Using the written word, survivors found a means of documenting for posterity the history of the towns prior to World War II, the events that swept over the towns during the war, and the fate of individuals who had been the inhabitants of the towns.
Each yizkor book is considered a matseyve [gravestone] to the people in the town who were killed during the Holocaust. There...
