NEXT ARTICLE: Yom, Ha- Find more information about at the Center for Jewish History: NOTE: you will be redirectedto the Web site for the The Yiddish term yizker-bikher (sg., yizker-bukh) has come to refer primarily to a vast body of memorial books commemorating Jewish communities destroyed in the Holocaust, primarily from prewar Poland though also throughout Eastern Europe (similar works have been created for other parts of Europe and the Mediterranean region). Survivors and émigrés from various communities that have organized landsmanshaftn (associations of Jews from the same hometowns abroad) in the United States, Israel, and elsewhere have produced many hundreds of such books, generally in Yiddish and/or Hebrew. Yizker-bikher are commonly understood, both by scholars and community members, as substitute gravestones for martyrs who never received proper Jewish burial. The scope of the genre is unprecedented and commensurate with the Jewish disaster in the Holocaust.
As a creative response to catastrophe, however, the books have a long pedigree in Jewish literature. The Book of Lamentations (recited annually on Tish‘ah be-Av) might be the progenitor of the Jewish literature of disaster. Massacres in Germany during the Crusades are recorded in Memorbücher of Ashkenazic Jewry. Closer to our time, Natan Note Hannover commemorated the victims of the seventeenth-century Khmel’nyts’kyi massacres in his work Yeven metsulah (The Abyss of Despair; 1653). The disruption of East European Jewish life during World War I was so great that it resulted in works such as A. S. Zaks’s Khoreve veltn (Ruined Worlds; 1917). Pogroms during the Russian Civil War in the early 1920s led to the first twentieth-century memorial book, Khurbn Proskurov (Destruction of Proskurov; 1924). The classic image of the shtetl canonized in modern Yiddish literature also influenced the retrospective portrait of ruined hometowns. The books range in format from thin, paperbound volumes produced in displaced persons camps shortly after World War II (such as Der untergang fun Zlotshev; 1947, published in Munich and printed in Yiddish that is transliterated into Latin characters) to the four large-format volumes devoted to every aspect of the history and daily life of the Jews of Slonim (Pinkes Slonim; 1962–1979
, published in Tel Aviv). Sometimes guest editors were hired to review and coordinate the flood of submissions that came in from surviving townspeople. Likewise, many of the books contain substantial initial sections chronicling the history of the town’s Jewish community, often written on commission by professional historians. Central to the genre, though not found in every individual book, are lists of the names of the dead that indicate the close link between the books and the ritual of yizker that shares their name. Books are frequently divided into pre–World War I, interwar, and Holocaust sections, but in fact they are rarely organized on a strictly chronological basis. While some deal primarily or exclusively with the period of genocide, more commonly the life of the community commands most of the space of the book. Thus, for example, of the more than 400 double-columned Hebrew and Yiddish pages constituting Sefer Horodenke (The Book of Horodenko; 1963), more than 350 describe “Horodenke before the Khurbn” (divided into sections on The City and Its Surroundings, Institutions and Organizations, and Memories and Descriptions).
Forty pages on the destruction follow, and the book concludes with a list of the names of hundreds of Jews who were killed. More generally, yizker-bikher are an extraordinarily rich source for folklore, cultural traditions, and social history, especially about the early decades of the twentieth century. Since yizker-bikher were explicitly understood by those who wrote, edited, and published them to be artifacts by and for residents of the town and their descendants, they were generally printed in small editions of several hundred to a thousand. Original copies can be difficult to obtain today. However, increasing recognition of the richness of yizker-bikher, especially as a genealogical source, has resulted both in increased use of the books and efforts to make their contents widely available. Significant, and nearly complete, collections are housed at the YIVO Institute in New York, Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, and the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Some, such as Chrzanów: The Life and Destruction of a Jewish Shtetl (1989), have been translated into English and printed in new editions.
In early 2004, the National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts, announced a campaign to raise funds for a project to make all of the yizker-bikher available through digitization and printing on demand. Jack Kugelmass and Jonathan Boyarin, trans. and eds., From a Ruined Garden: The Memorial Books of Polish Jewry (Bloomington, Ind., 1998). Electronic books collections listed in this section are available to authorized Yeshiva University users. Electronic Books Collections in the Public Domain and Electronic Books Collections of Jewish Interest in the Public Domain are listed below this section. Additional e-books may be found in the YULIS catalog. Bar Ilan Online Judaic Responsa Searching Online Responsa Early English Books Online (EEBO) - Contains digital facsimile page images of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473-1700, from the first book printed in English by William Caxton, through the age of Spenser and Shakespeare and the tumult of the English Civil War.
These books are listed in YULIS, the Library's online catalog. - A collection of several thousand electronic books from netLibrary is available to Yeshiva University Library patrons. ebrary - Thousands of e-books in a variety of academic fields, regularly updated with current publications. Eighteenth Century Collections Online - 138,000 English-language titles and editions published between 1701 and 1800, including every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in the United Kingdom, along with thousands of important works from the Americas. Humanities E-Books, HEB (formerly History E-Books Project) - Now comprising the full text of over 1500 titles, HEB is expanding to include most humanities disciplines and area studies. HEB is growing by over 300 titles a year. A project of the American Council of Learned Societies. Otzar HaHochma Online - A digital library of more than 53,000 traditional Hebrew books. Oxford Reference Online - Dictionaries and reference works in a single cross-searchable resource, covering general reference, language, science and medicine, humanities and social sciences, business and professional fields.
PsycBooks - A full-text database of books and chapters from the American Psychological Association, featuring publications from 1953 and on, including 100 out-of-print books, approximately 50 archival resources in psychology and an exclusive electronic release of the APA/Oxford University Press Encyclopedia of Psychology. - Includes works categorized as reference works, verse, fiction and non-fiction. Electronic Text Center - Thousands of publicly accessible texts. A University of Virginia project. Google books - The massive book digitization project. To limit your search to books available in full text click on the "Full view" radio button. Humanities Text Initiative - Includes poetry and prose works and "Making of America" (MOA), a digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. A University of Michigan project. Internet Archive - The Internet Archive was founded to build an Internet library, with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format.
The Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages. Internet Public Library (IPL) - The IPL Books Collection contains over 20,000 titles in the public domain. Mathematical monographs - More than 2,000 volumes of significant historical mathematical material from the university libraries at Cornell, Gottingen, and Michigan. NCBI Bookshelf (National Center for Biotechnology Information) - a database of biomedical books searchable by concept. Online Books - More than 18000 freely available electronic books from a variety of sources are included. A University of Pennsylvania project. Page by Page Books - Hundreds of classical books. Project Gutenberg - There are three portions of the Project Gutenberg Library. They may be described as: light literature such as Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass, Peter Pan, Aesop's Fables, etc; heavy literature, such as Shakespeare, Moby Dick, Paradise Lost, etc; reference works such as Roget's Thesaurus, almanacs, etc.
Hebrew Books - Hebrew books (and some journals,) mostly out of print or difficult to obtain, primarily American publications. Ladino Digital Library - Stanford University. Ma'agar Sifrut HaKodesh (Snunit) - Jewish texts: Tanakh, Mishnah, Tosefta, Talmud Yerushalmi, Talmud Bavli, Mishneh Torah leha-Rambam Mechon Mamre - Jewish texts: "Hebrew Bible (Tanach) in four editions inHebrew (including one withcantillation marks), one inAramaic(Targum Onqelos), one in English(JPS 1917), and one inparallel Hebrew and English," Mishnah, Tosefta, Talmud Yerushalmi, Talmud Bavli, Mishneh Torah and more. Menasseh Ben Israel Collection - The digital collection consists of material belonging to the holdings of the Library of the Universiteit van Amsterdam Online Heritage - JNUL (Jewish National and University Library) Digitized Book Repository - titles ranges from 15th century incunabula to early 20th century works. Project Ben-Yehuda - Classics of Hebrew literature, poetry, prose, etc.