What is a yizkor book?
Yizkor books, also known as memorial books, chronicle the lives of Jewish communities destroyed during the Holocaust. These rare books uniquely record the history of the shtetls, cities, or regions of Europe, and are often one of the few remaining sources on a town’s people, as well as its cultural, religious, and social institutions. As such, these works are an invaluable resource for scholars and family historians, providing personal glimpses into Jewish life before, during, and after the Holocaust. The first yizkor books were written immediately following the War, as reassembling the pieces of their community’s life and history often became an early focus of Holocaust survivors. Work on some memorial books began as early as the displaced persons’ camps, while others emerged later out of the painstaking efforts of the landsmanshaften, the immigrant mutual aid societies in Israel and North and South America. Their collective efforts created an estimated one thousand memorial books hon
