Featured Excerpt: Once There Was a Town

Described as an “animated tapestry” by The Wall Street Journal, Jane Ziegelman’s Once There Was a Town is an exploration of the books created by Jewish Holocaust survivors to honor their lost world. Alongside accounts of daily life in these Jewish towns, Ziegelman reveals the poignant stories of her own family’s immigration to the United States. Read on for a featured excerpt from the book.

Yizkor

While some cultures honor the dead with pyramids or triumphal arches, Jews have traditionally built monuments of paper and ink. In the face of violent and persistent upheaval, yizkor books were a source of continuity, links in the “golden chain” that connected one generation to the next. The portable monuments of a nomadic people, they provided Jews with both a way to mourn and a way to remember.

For the Jewish people, the injunction to remember is a religious obligation that falls on each of us. The Old Testament is rife with them. Remember the covenant! Remember your ancestors! Remember the days of yore! Jewish worship is similarly memory-centric. Three times a day, observant Jews recite a prayer recalling their biblical ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Every Passover, Jews gather at the family table to retell the story of the Exodus from Egypt. Which is all to say that yizkor books arose from a long tradition of remembering.

The word “yizkor” comes from the Hebrew, lizkor, “to remember.” Literally translated, it means “may he remember,” the first word of a memorial prayer recited by the bereaved asking God to remember the souls of their loved ones. The idea of such a prayer goes back a thousand years to medieval Germany and the Jewish communities that formed along the Rhine River. During the Crusades, with Western Christendom hopped up on the promise of holy war, those communities became the targets of antisemitic killing mobs. The first in a chain of springtime massacres took place in Speyer on May 3, a Sabbath, in 1096. Twelve were killed. Worms was next, where eight hundred Jews were slaughtered when they refused to be baptized. In Mainz, six hundred Jews lost their lives, many by suicide.

The Rhineland massacres inspired new forms of remembering. On certain days of the year, memorials were held when the names of those killed were read aloud in synagogue, each name introduced by some version of this plea:

May God remember the souls of those who gave their lives for the sanctification of God. In reward, may their souls be bound in the bundle of life with the souls of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and Sarah and Rebecca and Rachel and Leah in Paradise.

These words became the basis for the yizkor or memorial prayers said today. At a time when Jews were becoming more and more interested in the afterlife, memorials for the dead helped speed the soul to paradise. But if that was the goal for the dead, for the living they strengthened the bonds of memory that connect a people to their past and to each other. 

The oldest surviving yizkor book was written in Nuremberg in 1296 to coincide with the dedication of the town’s new synagogue. The original scribe was Isaac ben Samuel of Meiningen, who was killed just two years later in the Nuremberg pogrom of 1298. The work of many hands, the Nuremberg yizkor book was supplemented by future scribes who kept running lists of both persecuted and ordinary Jews who had died natural deaths, particularly those who had given freely to charity. The Nuremberg memorbuch, as it’s known, became the model for other communities both in the Rhineland and beyond. As Jews fleeing persecution migrated into Eastern Europe, they carried the yizkor book tradition with them and kept it alive into the early twentieth century.

In the aftermath of World War II, Jews in unprecedented numbers looked to this form of memorial literature. According to current estimates, more than 1,500 yizkor books are in existence today, most of them produced in the fifties, sixties, and seventies. Privately published, yizkor books share certain characteristics as objects. Most are bound in dark cloth—typically black or navy—with titles embossed in bold gilt letters. Titles are short and direct, in some cases a single word, just the name of a town: Belz, Lutsk, Ratno, Radom, Kobrin. In size, yizkor books are comparable to the old-style encyclopedias that used to come in volumes, A through Z. They generally run between four hundred and eight hundred pages. They are not meant to be portable but to sit in comfort on a bookshelf. Large, dark, and heavy, they exude a sense of permanence.