34 | JANUARY 27 • 2022 S ix million Jewish individuals were killed during the Holocaust, and many of the hundreds of European communities where they lived were essentially decimated. Afterward, beginning in the 1950s and continuing even today, some Jewish survivors of European villages, cities and regions began to publish books about their communities. They wanted to document the rich Jewish life of their hometowns, often dating back hundreds of years, and to pay tribute to the family members who had died during the Holocaust. In Yiddish, these books are known as Yizkor Bikhur — memorial or remembrance books. In a sense, they serve as a form of Kaddish — the memorial prayer said for deceased family members — for Jewish communities that were destroyed. Many volumes were published in Israel and the U.S. after the war in a range of formats and languages. Sometimes members of landsmannshaften (organizations of Jews from the same European hometown) published them. Some books, such as the one published by the New Cracow Friendship Society, include individual family tribute pages that list deceased relatives and helped pay for publication. Some communities published more than one memorial book. With black and white photos of rabbis, school children, family groups, synagogues and homes, these books create poignant images of the past. Some include detailed histories of Jewish communities dating back to the 1500s. DAVID-HORODOK The memorial book for David-Horodok, a town in Byelorussia, includes photos and descriptions of individual Jewish partisan and resistance fighters. Detroit is home to many descendants of this town, about 60 miles from Pinsk. Heart-breaking first-person accounts document how the Nazis and some cooperative locals first took away the Jewish community’s rights and dignity, then their property and finally their lives. Many Jewish Horodokers were murdered in or near the town in 1941 by the SS and local non-Jewish citizens, as described by survivors in the memorial book. Faiga Weiss, librarian and archivist at the Zekelman Holocaust Center (HC) in Farmington Hills, explains that “memorial books have the capability to give someone identity, a connection to their roots. In Pirkei Avot, [Chapter of the Fathers] Chapter 3, Verse 1, the Mishnah says, ‘Know from where you came, and where you are going…’” These books, she explains “brings the history to your face.” The HC has more than 1,600 memorial books — one of the largest collections in the United States, according to Memorial Books of Eastern European Jewry, published in 2011. An estimated 2,000 memorial books have been published worldwide. The Holocaust has inspired a huge volume of literature, but the memorial/remembrance book designation is limited to volumes that include lists of pre-war community residents and those who died during the Holocaust, Weiss explains. When Rabbi Charles Rosenzveig opened the West Bloomfield Holocaust Memorial Center in 1984 (which later Holocaust memorial books document Jewish life and death. Kaddish for Jewish Communities SHARI S. COHEN CONTRIBUTING WRITER OUR COMMUNITY HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY Resources for Those Interested in Holocaust Memorial Books For those seeking a memorial book for a particular town or region, the Zekelman Holocaust Center provides an online list at www.holo- caustcenter.org/visit/library-archive/ memorial-book-collection/ Due to remodeling, the collection is currently in storage, but individ- uals interested in research or in viewing specific books can contact faiga.weiss@hmc.org for assistance. In addition, the New York Public Library offers some scanned memorial books on its website: https://libguides.nypl.org/yizkor- books The National Yiddish Book Center sell reprints of some memo- rial books: www.yiddishbookcenter. org/collections/yizkor-books/how- to-order Translations of memorial books are available through www.jewish- gen.org/Yizkor/ybip.html or www. amazon.com. Source: Faiga Weiss SHARI S. COHEN Examples of memorial books from the Zekelman Holocaust Center’s collection.