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From memorials to invaluable historical documentation: Using yizkor books as resource for studying a vanished world
Abstract
Description: This presentation will describe large existing collections of Yizkor Book held at libraries in the U.S. and abroad. The overview will include information on provisions for online searching capability and the availability of books for loan and/or for selected page duplication. An attempt will be made to present an in-depth analysis of over 500 Yizkor Books in terms of the localities (towns and countries), the country and date of publication, the language (primary and secondary), the availability of information on town history, the inclusion of photographs and name lists, and more. _______________________________ At the Libraries of Yad Vashem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, as well as at a number of other institutions around the world, there are collections of books locked in glass-enclosed bookcases. Most often these publications do not circulate. They are treated like rare books only more so because thieves have stolen them. These are the collections of Yizkor Books, memorial books to the victims of the Holocaust. What wealth is stored in these books to make them so valuable that they are worth stealing? The purpose of this paper is to try to find answers to the question posed above by analyzing the contents of a core collection of about 500 Yizkor Books and to study them otherwise in order to establish what information can be gleaned from these material for the study of Jewish history and family genealogy.
... Librarians and researchers will also find Estelle Guzik's work (2003), Genealogical Resources in New York, extremely helpful. Ilana Tahan (2004) details the holdings at the British Library; Michlean Amir (2001) describes the holdings of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum; and Faith Jones and Gretta Siegel (2006) summarize the major collections in libraries and archives around the world. (A detailed and up-to-date bibliographical listing of all yizkor books that have been identified has not yet been compiled. ...
We describe an unsupervised, language-independent spelling correction search system. We compare the proposed approach with unsupervised and supervised algorithms. The described approach consistently outperforms other unsupervised efforts and nearly matches the performance of a current state-of-the-art supervised approach.
Yizkor Book collections contain firsthand commemorative accounts of events from the era surrounding the rise and fall of Nazi Germany, including documents from before, during, and after the Holocaust. Prior to our effort, information regarding the content and location of each Yizkor Book volume was limited. We established a centralized index and metadata repository for the Yizkor Book collection and developed a detailed search interface accessible worldwide.
We address foreign name search in a highly diverse user community. User sophistication ranges from highly experienced archivists
to apprehensive users who shy away from technology; apprehensive users dominate system use. Thus, all system interfaces must
assume minimal dependency on the user.
Our foreign names search approach, called Segments, is language independent; thus, there is no need to determine the language of origin from the diverse candidate set of thirteen
languages. We compare Segments against traditional n-gram and Soundex based solutions. Actual and synthetic queries are used to search a names data set
resident in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. We also search a subset of the 1990 United States Census Bureau Surnames
data set to evaluate the performance of Segments on a predominately language specific (English) collection. Our results demonstrate statistically significant performance
gains over both traditional approaches. The described approach supports search efforts at the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum.
Yizkor Books contain firsthand accounts of events that occurred before, during, and after the Holocaust. These books were
published with parts in thirteen languages, across six continents, spanning a period of more than 60 years and are an important
resource for research of Eastern European Jewish communities, Holocaust studies, and genealogical investigations. Numerous
Yizkor Book collections span the globe. One of the largest collections of Yizkor Books is housed within the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum. Due to their rare and often fragile conditions, the original Yizkor Books are vastly underutilized.
Ongoing efforts to digitize and reprint Yizkor Books increases the availability of the books, however, the capability to search
information about their content is nonexistent. We established a centralized index for Yizkor Books and developed a detailed
search interface accessible worldwide, capable of efficiently querying the data. Our interface offers unique features and
provides novel approaches to foreign name and location search. Furthermore, we describe and demonstrate a rule set to assist
searches based on inaccurate terms. This system is currently under the auspices of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Bibliography of Eastern European Memorial (Yizkor) Books: with Call Numbers for Six Judaica Libraries
- Zachary M Baker
Baker, Zachary M. Bibliography of Eastern European Memorial (Yizkor) Books: with Call Numbers
for Six Judaica Libraries in New York (New York: Jewish Genealogical Society, 1992)
Bibliographical List of Memorial Books Published in the Years 1943-1972
- David Bass
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Vashem Studies on the Eastern European Catastrophe and Resistance IX (Jerusalem: Yad
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Reading and Writing during the Holocaust as Described in Yisker Books" in The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation
- Rosemary Horowitz
Horowitz, Rosemary. "Reading and Writing during the Holocaust as Described in Yisker Books" in
The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation, Jonathan Rose, editor (Amherst:
Univ. of Mass. Press, 2001)
My Jewish Roots: A Practical Guide to the Tracing and Recording Your Genealogy and Family History
- David Kranzler
Kranzler, David. My Jewish Roots: A Practical Guide to the Tracing and Recording Your
Genealogy and Family History (New York: Sepher-Hermon Press, 1979)
Yisker Bikher and the Problem of Historical Veracity: an Anthropological Approach" in The Jews of Poland Between the Two World Wars
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Where Once We Walked: A Guide to the Jewish Communities Destroyed in the Holocaust
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Communities Destroyed in the Holocaust (Teaneck, NJ: Avotaynu, 1991)
Memorial Books as a Source for Research into the History of Jewish Communities in Europe
- Abraham Wein
Wein, Abraham. "Memorial Books as a Source for Research into the History of Jewish
Communities in Europe" in Yad Vashem Studies on the Eastern European Catastrophe and
Resistance IX (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1973).