Tag Archives: holocaust

Jewish Genealogy Basics: Yizkor Books

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It is a bit sad to have to include Yizkor Books under my ‘Jewish Genealogy Basics’ category on this blog, but unfortunately most Jewish people have relatives who perished in the Holocaust, and there is no getting past that fact. Yizkor Books are an important resource for those people whose relatives came from the towns and regions covered by these books, mainly because these towns don’t exist anymore or have no Jewish remnants in any case. These books are the last memories of the people who lived in these communities.

Yizkor Books were generally books put together by survivors of a specific community, usually a town or city, although sometimes books were put together for larger regions. These were Holocaust survivors who wanted to share what their community had been like before the Holocaust, and what happened to it during the Holocaust. In most cases the Jewish communities described in these books completely ceased to exist after the war, and the survivors made their way to different countries including the US, Israel and various South American countries. Thus these books were published in the years following the war, in the 50s, 60s and 70s mostly (although some were published even in the 80s and 90s), in a mix of languages that may include Hebrew, Yiddish, English and more. Many of the books list the names of those people from the town that were killed during the war (these are called necrologies).

It’s important to remember that Yizkor Books were put together by members of the destroyed community, usually only for members of that community. They were generally printed privately in small quantities, and thus most of these books are not widely available. Some libraries have made an effort to build collections of Yizkor books, to preserve them and to make them available to the public. JewishGen keeps a list of libraries with Yizkor Book collections, and lets you search for specific towns and see which libraries hold their Yizkor Books. I don’t know if any library has every Yizkor book published, although it’s a good bet that Yad Vashem (which lists 1040 Yizkor Books in their collection) is about as comprehensive a collection as you will find. I suspect the publishers of these books all donated copies to Yad Vashem to insure there was at least one copy available there.

In the US, one of the largest collections of Yizkor Books is at the NY Public Library, in their Dorot Jewish Division. The library has over 750 Yizkor Books available for viewing, but more interestingly for those who do not live in NY (or even for those who do), is that they have digitized some 650 of those books and made them available for viewing online. On the web site you can choose a book and browse through the pages of each book, but they are not searchable. Keep in mind most of these books are in either Hebrew (if published in Israel) or Yiddish (if published in the US). Some of the books have small English sections, but usually the majority of the books are in either Hebrew or Yiddish.

Some of the Yizkor books can be searched via the GenealogyIndexer.org web site, which indexes many books and makes them searchable online, including directories and Yizkor Books. Keep in mind that this search is based on computer software which tries to automatically transcribe each page, so it is not perfect, and although it indexes Hebrew and Yiddish, you will need to search in Hebrew or Yiddish to find those words in the index. If you’re searching for a last name, you can search in both English and Hebrew, for example, by including both the name in Hebrew and English and eparating them with the Boolean OR, for example:

Traurig OR טראוריג

Keep in mind that even if you know the spelling of a name in Hebrew, it may have been different in Yiddish.

In addition to the NYPL and GenealogyIndexer.org, JewishGen has an ongoing project to transcribe (English sections) and translate all (non-English sections) of Yizkor Books and place the text online. In addition, as books are transcribed and translated, all the names listed in the books are added to their Necrology Database which is searchable on their web site. Keep in mind that not all books have been fully translated, so even if your relative is mentioned in one of the books on their site, their name may not yet show up in the database. You can see which parts of each book have been translated so far, and which are still let to be translated. If you have a lot of family from a particular town that has a Yizkor Book, you might consider donating to the translation expenses for that Yizkor Book to help get it translated faster.

Lastly, I should mention that although many of the books are hard to find, it is possible to buy many of these books, either in used book stores or as reprints. Some specialist booksellers like Dan Wyman Books in Brooklyn, NY, Broder Books in Waterbury, CT, Henry Hollander Books in San Francisco, CA and Book Gallery in Jerusalem carry Yizkor Books, or can help you find them. The Yiddish Book Center, in Amherst, MA, which saves Yiddish books of all kinds has, with the help of Steven Spielberg, created on online library of 11,000 scanned Yiddish books, and also offers a specific service that sells reprints of the Yizkor Books in their collection for $48 each.

Yad Vashem’s Quest

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An article in the Ha’aretz newspaper in Israel reports that Yad Vashem has collected the names of four million Jewish Holocaust victims, two thirds of the estimated total. While no one expects them to complete the list (due to lack of records or lack of witnesses), they have made some impressive progress in the past decade. Yad Vashem says that fully one and a half million names were added in just the past ten years. Many of those names were added by Russian Jews, perhaps due either to the many Russian immigrants to Israel in the past two decades, or due to the opening of communications with Russia during the same time period.

Vad Vashem has always had a kind of quest to complete the list of victims. It’s not just a technical issue, but an issue of remembrance. Some people perished along with their entire families. Who will remember that they existed once?

I wrote previously about Yad Vashem’s Pages of Testimony and how important it is to fill out Pages of relatives you know perished in the Holocaust and also know are not in the Shoah Names Database. If we don’t tell the stories of those family members of ours that died in the Holocaust, who will tell their stories? I’ve never surveyed my family tree about this, but certainly among the information I’ve collected from other family members it is not uncommon to find relatives that died during the Holocaust. It’s always interesting to see how this is recorded in genealogy records, as some people just list the death as taking place during the war, while others write ‘Murdered by the Nazis,’ or simply ‘Holocaust’. In other peoples’ records, there is no reference at all to the person having been killed in the Holocaust, and if it was an elderly person who died in the early 1940s, who would necessarily think that they were murdered? Sometimes you jump to conclusions based on where they lived, how old they were, etc. but it may or may not be true.

I’m the last person to tell someone to write something without sources. Sources are another topic I hope to cover in this blog in the future, but for now let me just say that it’s important to provide evidence for everything you do in genealogy. I do think that if you know your relatives perished in the Holocaust, you should make an effort to go through your records, fill out a Page of Testimony for each relative, and then submit them all to Yad Vashem. No one should be forgotten.

Yad Vashem Pages of Testimony and ShoahConnect.org

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PoT submitted by Alexander Vogel of Mindel Salzmann


A major project of Yad Vashem, the Israel Holocaust museum, since its founding, has been to try to collect information on every victim of the Holocaust. This has taken a number of forms, but for many it is best represented by their Pages of Testimony project, which allows anyone to submit a page of information on someone they knew to have perished in the Holocaust. In many cases, these Pages of Testimony are the only record of existence of someone who died, as many primary records were destroyed in the war. Yad Vashem has made efforts over the years to collect these Pages from survivors and relatives of victims, including a big push in Israel in the 1950s to collect information. I remember over the years when visiting Yad Vashem, part of the visit would include searching their database for names of relatives, and being offered to submit names of people not in the database. In 2004 Yad Vashem finished digitizing all the Pages of Testimony and made the entire database available on the web (with some additional sources of information like transport lists – creating the Shoah Names Database), a major breakthrough for those researching their families, and also enabled a new push from Yad Vashem to gather information on victims not yet in the database. As the number of survivors dwindle, those with memories of relatives and friends who were murdered in the Holocaust, and if Pages of Testimony are not filled out soon, knowledge of some peoples very existence may be forgotten forever.

For the Jewish genealogist, searching the Pages of Testimony has long been a very powerful tool. While not every form was completely filled out, many forms include the name of the person, maiden name for women, the name of the person’s parents, where and when they were born, where they lived during the war, what their profession was, etc. All very important information for someone researching their family. To get the full impact of searching the database, it helps to learn how best to use the Advanced Search interface, which allows you to search by specific fields like town of birth, or maiden name. Searching by town alone is something I highly recommend if you know where someone was born, or where your family was primarily from in Europe, as it may show people that you either didn’t think of, or might show spellings that are different than you are used to seeing. The spelling issue is important since many of the forms were submitted in Hebrew, and had the English spellings transliterated automatically. Thus the spelling may be computer-generated, and not necessarily the same spelling you think it will be.

Another important technique for getting the most out of searching the Pages, is that once you find a Page about someone in your family, you should look to see who submitted the information. That person is likely related to you as well. Depending on when the Page was submitted, you may even be able to track down the person who submitted the Page and find out more, or in some cases track down their descendants. When you find a Page, note that there is a menu called Related Searches. The most important search is ‘Pages of Testimony by submitter(s) with the same name’. Most people who submitted Pages, submitted multiple Pages. By seeing which other Pages were submitted by the same person who submitted a Page on a family member of yours, you will likely find Pages of other family members (although some may be of friends or family members from the other side of their family). This search can also be replicated in the Advanced Search form by entering the name of the submitter, and then you can refine the search by adding other fields.

Some people who first find a record of a family member who died in the Holocaust by searching the Pages are frustrated when they realize that person who submitted the Page of Testimony is a relative that they were not aware of, yet the Page was submitted so long ago that they cannot track down the person (and many submitters are now deceased). In some cases, if the record was submitted by someone who lived in Israel, it is possible to track down the person or their descendant through a database kept by Magen David Adom (Israel’s Red Cross). There are individuals who have access to this same database and can probably search it quicker than going through the normal channels. Some of these people are professional genealogists who charge for this service, but I recommend joining the mailing list of the Israel Genealogical Society (which recently merged with the Jewish Family Research Association) and posting questions about people, as there are people on the list who can and probably will look up people for you for free.

There are other resources for tracking down survivors, or information on victims, such as the International Tracing Service, and connected services run through the American Red Cross and the USHMM. That is a whole different topic, however, perhaps for a later post.

So what happens if you find a Page of Testimony submitted by a relative you can’t track down, and may never be able to find, but through which you think you can reconnect to extended family? Here technology offers an interesting solution. Logan Kleinwaks, who also operates the genealogyindexer.org site, runs a site called ShoahConnect.org which is directly relevant. ShoahConnect does something very powerful – it allows anyone to connect themselves to a Page of Testimony, and if someone else uses the site to connect to the same Page, it will notify each person connected to the same Page that there are other people interested in the person on that Page of Testimony. This allows distant relatives to reconnect through their shared relation to a person recorded on a Page of Testimony on Yad Vashem’s site. As of this writing, there are 744 users of the site, with 10,978 connections. This uses a similar technique to the LostCousins.com web site which connects people through common relatives in census records in the US, Canada and the UK.

ShoahConnect utilizes the Google Toolbar to pull off it’s work, so it’s not quite a simple as selecting a name on a web site. However, once you have Google Toolbar installed (in Firefox for Mac and Windows, or Internet Explorer for Windows), clicking a link on the site adds a C-shaped button to the toolbar. The next time you are viewing a Page of Testimony you just click on the new button to link to that Page of Testimony. Follow the instructions on ShoahConnect to get everything set up, and then head over to Yad Vashem’s site and start adding connections.

One last point to make about Pages of Testimony and ShoahConnect – if you want to make connections to other relatives but can’t find relatives on Yad Vashem that you know perished in the Holocaust, you should submit Pages of Testimony for your relatives to the Yad Vashem site, and then link to the Pages you submitted using ShoahConnect. Another thing to remember is that you can provide your own contact information to the Page of Testimony so that if even if someone is not using ShoahConnect, but finds the Page of Testimony that you submitted, they will still be able to reach you based on the contact information you provided as the submitter of the Page of Testimony. If you have photos of the people you are submitting a Page of Testimony for, make sure to also submit the photos, as your branch of the family may be the only branch to have photos of that relative.

The Encyclopedia of Jewish Life Before and During the Holocaust

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It’s hard to do Jewish genealogy and not run into Avotaynu, the long-time and as far as I can tell only publisher dedicated to publishing books on the topic of Jewish genealogy. They also publish a self-titled quarterly journal, Avotaynu, on Jewish genealogy and an e-mail newsletter called Nu, What’s New?.

Avotaynu mostly sells their own books, but occassionally sells other books as well. On set of books they’ve been selling for years is NYU Press and Yad Vashem’s The Encyclopedia of Jewish Life Before and During the Holocaust. It’s a three-volume set that provides details on many of the Jewish communities that existed before the Holocaust. It is essentially an abridgment and translation of Yad Vashem’s much larger Hebrew set called Pinkas HaKehilot, published over many years which covers in much greater detail each of the Jewish communities that existed before the Holocaust and what happened to them during and after the war. I highly recommend this set for anyone researching their families in Europe before the war, as it provides a lot of information on many communities that are hard to find out about elsewhere.

In this weeks’ Nu, What’s New? e-mail, Avotaynu mentions that while the set costs $199 on Amazon, they are currently selling it for only $99 plus shipping, per arrangement with the publisher. Shipping from Avotaynu is $20 in the US. So $119 for the books plus shipping.

NYU Press, the publisher, is also selling it for $99 plus shipping on their own site, with the use of a coupon code (see their site for the code). Oddly they show the $99 price as a discount from $350, yet if you go to the regular page for the set, it sells for $199. In any event, it’s currently $99 plus shipping. I don’t know what the shipping costs are from NYU Press, as you need to become a member of their site to find out.

Interestingly enough, Yad Vashem also sells this set directly from their web site. However, Yad Vashem sells it for only $55. Shipping within Israel is free from Yad Vashem, so if you live in Israel it would seem to be a no-brainer where to order it from. If you live outside of Israel, shipping costs $55 which while high, still brings the total cost in the US to $110 instead of the $119 from Avotaynu.

In short, if you live in Israel, definitely order it from Yad Vashem directly. If you live in the US, perhaps check out how much NYU Press is charging for shipping before deciding where to order from. I highly recommend this set for anyone researching their family in Europe.