When Bill Connelly heard that the heirs of a collector of Jewish memorial books were cleaning out his library, he rushed to New York and fished dozens of the Yiddish-language volumes out of a municipal trash bin.
With their lists of residents from long vanished European communities — sometimes recorded street by street — the books often are all that's left of entire villages or neighborhoods consumed in the Nazi genocide of World War II.
To rescue a name is to rescue a life from oblivion, Holocaust survivors believe.
The yizkor books, from the Hebrew word for "remember," are now on the shelves, alongside hundreds of other volumes, at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum where Connelly works.
Now, the museum is gaining access to millions more names, the largest registry of Holocaust victims existing anywhere.
You can read more about this interesting story in an article written by Arthur Max and published in the Associated Press. It is available at http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5i3Dy4KVqcVA8dtFs12wDs81uHomQD8T85KKO0.
