Books of Life

By Marjorie Backman

Some bitter and mournful, others folksy, the manuscripts lay abandoned. Who could find them, buried in attics and special libraries? Who could read their Yiddish? And so these Yizkor (or memory) books--written as requiems to entire Jewish communities extinguished by World War II--were nearly forgotten. After all, few of the Holocaust survivors who memorialized the dead were professional writers. The more than 1,200 texts they wrote chronicle the sad years of genocide and often the decades, even centuries, before. Their accounts, typically printed in limited press runs, adapted a Jewish tradition from the late 13th century of recording pogrom victims.

Today these books are becoming more widely read, thanks to a small army of Jewish-history buffs. In 1997 volunteers started to secure copyright permissions, translate the volumes and publish them online in a centralized place. The Yizkor Book Project website, www.jewishgen.org/yizkor is making these books available in English for the first time. Also Translated: descriptions of lost communities compiled by Israel's Holocaust museum Yad Vashem. The website boasts 584 entries describing some 450 disappeared communities, listed from A to Z, with 9,096 graphic images. A searchable database of necrologies retrieves different spellings of family names.

The re-creation on the Internet of the Jewish shtetls of Central and Eastern Europe has been orchestrated largely by volunteer dynamo Joyce Field of West Lafayette, Ind. After retiring in 1994, Field, a former human-resources manager for software firms, purchased a computer and helped a cousin research their family history. Separately, a newly discovered relative involved with the genealogy website JewishGen enlisted Field to arrange Yizkor-book translations for their family's use. Before she knew it, Field, at 65, had become full-time manager of the Yizkor Book Project for JewishGen. Says Field: "Whereas Hitler tried to obliterate the memory of Jewish contributions to European history, these books confront the lie."

Website visitors--who logged 1.9 million impressions in 2003--include Jewish family-history devotees as well as East Europeans of other ethnicities exploring their communities' past. "The Yizkor-book pages are linking people in the West, Holocaust survivors and children of survivors to non-Jewish people in those European towns," Field says. Sixty years after the horrors of the Holocaust, the Internet is serving as a tool of reconciliation. "The younger generation is realizing that they are missing a significant part of their history," she adds. "This type of material was suppressed by the communists," who severely restricted access to Jewish archival records.

Now word is out. Art teacher Marzena Gruszecka contacted Field from Zgierz, Poland, a predominantly Catholic city where no Jews remain. She had found a Yizkor-book link online while researching her town's Jewish history. At 51, she and others of her generation are too young to remember when, she says, "most of the shops in the town's main street belonged to Jews." President of the Association of Cultural Preservation of the City of Zgierz, Gruszecka is having the Yizkor book translated into Polish and posted online. After funds are raised, she will publish a hardbound version with historical commentary and photos as the centerpiece of "a year of remembrance of the Jewish community," which will include concerts, exhibits, symposiums and landmark identification. "We hope the publication of this moving story about a world that doesn't exist anymore will be a very special event," she says. In the communist era, the ideology was that "Poland is a country of one nation and one culture." As a result, she adds, "people have been deprived of their roots. [Now] there is a chance for renewal of Zgierz, in architecture and the re-creation of its identity."

No one could be more delighted than Jerrold Jacobs of Egg Harbor Township, N.J. In 1998, the retired CEO of Atlantic Energy hunted for documents shedding light on his family history, even traveling to his father's birthplace in Zgierz. Online, he found a comprehensive Zgierz Yizkor book for sale by a Tel Aviv bookstore. In 2000, Jacobs, then 62, became one of Field's volunteers, coordinating the book's translation into English and its publishing on the Internet (where Gruszecka discovered it).

That the Zgierz account not only described Nazi deportations but also detailed 19th century Jewish life was a bonus. Jacobs learned of ancestors who were FELDSCHERS (barber-surgeons), starting with his great-great-grandfather Meir Jakubowicz, who applied in 1843 to live outside the Jewish ghetto--a few overcrowded streets, whose confines Zgierz Jews battled for a half-century. Jakubowicz, who did not dress in traditional Jewish attire, was among the few granted permission. "When the cholera epidemic and other illnesses spread in the city, Jakubowicz always was available to serve the sick from various walks of life ... without reward," the account testified. Says Jacobs: "The book gives you a sense of being part of a continuum."

Likewise, when Field received a translation of a Hebrew Yizkor book about her father's birthplace, Debica, Poland, "I felt as if I was learning about my father again," she recalls. In February, Field was surprised by a request from the Friends of the Debica Region Society to republish excerpts in Polish. The email came from researcher Ireneusz Socha, 40, a Catholic, who was stirred to uncover Jewish history after living near a desecrated Jewish cemetery.

At times revisiting history can lead to controversy. Reverberations continue in the case of Jedwabne, Poland. In 1998 New York City attorney Ty Rogers posted online a Yizkor book www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/jedwabne/yedwabne.html describing a massacre that claimed 26 of his cousins. The book alleges that Poles--not Nazis, as asserted in Polish records--burned its 1,600 Jews in a barn on July 10, 1941. "They were killed by their neighbors," says Rogers. After New York University professor Jan Gross wielded this Yizkor book and other testimony to allege Polish culpability in a 2000 book, Neighbors, a "fire storm" of mass media, Web and academic reports raged. A two-year investigation by Poland's Institute for National Remembrance eventually "acknowledged that Poles were the actual culprits, although with German inspiration," Rogers says.

In addition to recording atrocities, Yizkor books narrate social history and show "how complex, interesting and diverse Yiddish culture was," says New York City musician Yale Strom. No major event in the shtetl was complete without klezmer music. That's why Strom plucked virtually every mention of Klezmer from Yizkor books for his 2003 online opus, the Book Of Klezmer www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/klezmer/klezmer.html) A leader of two Klezmer bands, Strom performs the almost lost songs he rescued. His play, Yiske Labushnik: A Klezmer's Tale, first staged in December in Manhattan, also revives such tunes. In the play, a musician traveling to Minsk in 1939 regales a 12-year-old with his experiences--composites of anecdotes from yizkor books. Through his art, Strom has brought back to life his spiritual Klezmer ancestors.

This spring new imaging technology is bringing the original, untranslated yizkor books to light. In April on-demand, exact copies became available for purchase from the Steven Spielberg--backed national yizkor book center in Amherst, Mass. in March the New York Public Library, home to the largest U.S. collection, started posting replicas online www.nypl.org/research/chss/jws/yizkorbooksall.cfm)

Meanwhile, each month JewishGen's Yizkor-book site adds more chapters. It's worth a visit--whether for a glimpse of old town folkways or for that sense of discovery when, as Jacobs says, history "bites you back from the past."