Nazi Archive Will Help Save Lost Names

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.

Comments

[Jeff Piper]

I can only wonder why anyone would just throw them out.

[Happy Dae]

I'm not Jewish, but I agree with the statement, "To rescue a name is to rescue a life from oblivion." I commend the hero, Bill Connelly. Image, if you will, if everyone would be so active in rescuing the documented lives of their ancestors!

Happy Dae.
http://www.ShoeStringGenealogy.com

[Linder]

Could it be that the manuscripts have been digitized? I can't believe that they would be thrown out. In any case, they belong in the US Holocaust Museum.

[Denny]

A collection of Yizkor books and their translations have been online for years at the JewishGen web site. The link is http://www.jewishgen.org/Yizkor/. The database includes books held by library and museums in the U.S., Great Britain and Israel.

JewishGen.org is a great website for researching Jewish genealogy.

[Susanna Friedman]

Thank goodness for people like Bill Connelly! Yizkor books are still being translated. This collection may contain information on shtetls not available elsewhere. Most materials, no doubt, were destroyed in German-conquered places, so this is an invaluable source of information. Many heirs may not realize the value of the collections. In fact, I've found some librarians aren't even trained to know the value of old collections before throwing them away. I've saved some, but learned too late about others. Hopefully, present owners of any type of collections will inform their heirs about them and to whom they wish to donate them so that special collections aren't discarded.