Yizkor books

The books are published by former residents or landsmanshaft societies as remembrances of homes, people and ways of life lost during World War II.

[1][2] Voluntary societies and welfare services of the various European Jewish communities, called landsmanshaften, usually took the lead in publishing them for their members who shared a common regional origin, history and culture.

[2][3] The first Yizkor books were published in the United States, mainly in Yiddish, the mother tongue of most of the members of the landsmanschaften and Holocaust survivors.

Beginning in the 1950s, after the immigration of large numbers of Holocaust survivors to the newly independent State of Israel, most of the Yizkor books were published there, between the mid-1950s and the mid-1970s, and mainly, but not exclusively, in Hebrew.

However, there have been a number of projects to collect and preserve these publications, digitize their contents and translate them into English, and make them available online: Large collections of Yizkor books are housed at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., the Jewish Theological Seminary and Yeshiva University in New York, University of California Los Angeles, the Holocaust Center of Northern California in San Francisco, Harvard and Brandeis universities near Boston, the Price Library of Judaica at the University of Florida, Gainesville, the Jewish Public Library of Montreal, and the Jewish Documentation and Research Center of Mexico.