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The Yizkor
(Memorial) book is an old Jewish custom, the first
one dating back more than 700 years. By listing the
deceased and their dates of death, the books helped
Jews remember their relatives in Yahrzeit (anniversary) prayers
and also to honor the
memory of friends, neighbors and those
without relatives to remember them.
After 1944 nearly 1,000
Yizkor books were published, created by
survivors, working though landsmanschaften -
associations of persons from the same city or town.
These books went far beyond listing those lost and
the tragic story of their demise in the shoah. They
preserved the memory of the community with history,
maps, photos, essays and personal stories.
cover
Luboml: The Memorial Book of a Vanished Shtetl |
The post-Holocaust Yizkor
books have seen three stages of development, each one
bringing the memories of these vanished communities to more
people.
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First, Yiddish and Hebrew
publications began to appear soon after
the end of the war and generally were created in
Israel. The Luboml Yizkor Book Sefer Zicron
L'Kehillat Luboml, edited by Berl Kagan z"l, was
published in Israel in 1974.
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Then English
translations, to reach a larger
audience and a new generation of readers. The English
version of the Luboml Yizkor Book Luboml: The
Memorial Book of a Vanished Shtetl, edited by
Nathan Sobel, was published in the US in 1997. We show
an introductory page below.
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And now digitization and
internet publication, to make the content of these
books available world-wide, free and on-demand.
The
Dorot Jewish Division of the New York Public Library
has 700 Yizkor Books, the largest collection in the
United States. They have digitized and made available
online 650 of these volumes.
more ....
Nearly all the online Yizkor books are in
Yiddish and Hebrew. Because of copyright restrictions the
more recent books - and that includes nearly all the
English language Yizkor
Books - are not available online.
In March 2010 the Liboviner - Voliner Benevolent
Society and Aaron Ziegelman, the copyright holders of the
English version of the Luboml Yizkor Book, gave the
New York Public Library permission for the book's
digitization and internet publication.
Luboml: The Memorial Book of a
Vanished Shtetl is now online on the NYPL website as an
Adobe Reader™ pdf document.
Click here.
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Roberta
Saltzman of the Dorot Jewish Division noted that the
Luboml Memorial Book is online in PDF (Adobe
Portable Document Format) which many find easier to
use than the proprietary format used for the other
Yizkor books. It allows people to enlarge images
(especially useful tor the maps in the Luboml book),
as well as print and save pages from the book. There
should be few, if any, technical issues for users
around the world. Most web users already have Adobe
PDF readers on their computer, and if they don't,
the software is free and easily downloadable.. |
About one tenth of the book's
pages are also online as a Google™
Book.
Click here.
To view the 1974 Yiddish and
Hebrew Luboml Yizkor Book,
click here.
We thank the Dorot Jewish
Division of the NYPL, Michael Terry and Roberta Saltzman for
their help so that others could remember this lost
community. |
