YIZKOR BOOKS – IMPORTANCE TO REMEMBER THE PAST

Yizkor Books have been published since 1943 to commemorate entire Jewish communities destroyed in the Holocaust. They have been published mainly in Israel, in Hebrew, Yiddish, and English. There have also been publications in other languages, such as Hungarian and German. The books were published by individuals, various organizations, and even school children, reaching peak numbers in the 1960s and 70s.

The books include a variety of texts, stories, historical overviews, poems, maps, drawings, photographs, and necrologies (lists of Holocaust victims) of the people and the institutions that made up the now-gone Jewish community. The books were created based on the idea that every person in the community was worth remembering, including even people from the lowest social strata, from the poorest to the richest. Yizkor books are an essential source of knowledge about Jewish life in Eastern Europe in the generation before the Holocaust, as well as during the Holocaust itself. In many cases, the books are the only source we have on the life and death of individuals, who would otherwise be lost to oblivion.

In this course, we will examine Yizkor books in person, take a look at their history and the people who published them, as well as discuss the role the books filled in Jewish commemoration of the Holocaust and its victims in the wake of the complete destruction of entire Jewries, and how they approached some areas of society, such as people with disabilities and Jewish-Gentile relations. We will also talk about how valuable books have been used as an essential source of information about Jewish victims of the Holocaust, as well as how we can use the books today to find information about family, ancestors and roots.

The New York Public Library has a substantial collection of Yizkor books available digitally online at Yizkor Book Collection – NYPL Digital Collections. 

Course structure

The methods used are lectures, discussions and examining actual Yizkor books in class. 

Prior knowledge

The course is given in English.

No prior knowledge about the subject is needed.

Course material

Course material is included in the cost for this course. 

About the teacher

Lior Becker, PhD, is a modern historian, teacher, and interdisciplinary scholar. His areas of expertise are Holocaust history, historiography and memory, 19th and 20th-century intellectual history, genocide studies, and Eastern-European Jewish history and culture. He has long experience teaching teens and adults in both Sweden and Israel. 

Photo: Iosif Perlman and his sisters and brothers, from Centropa.