Last week, I posted a question (well, several questions really) asking
whether anyone knows how or where I can search for information about
my family who fled >from Poland into the Soviet Union during WWII, and
in particular about my grandfather who volunteered to fight with the
Red Army, probably >from Simferopol in the Crimea, and was killed in
mid- to late 1941. I received several helpful suggestions that I am
following up, but today I want to focus on Mel Comisarow's informative
post about printed Russian memorial books, "kniga pamyati," which list
slain Red Army soldiers. Mel wrote that there is a four-volume
memorial book specifically listing Jewish Red Army soldiers, and some
200 other books based on region.

It was my understanding that the Jewish book forms the basis of
Alexander Zaslavsky's Book of Electronic Memory http://jmemory.org/
and that the regional books form the basis of the Russian Defense
Ministry's OBD memorial website
( http://www.obd-memorial.ru/html/index.html ), both of which sites I
have already searched in the past, without finding anything matching
my grandfather. This week, I found a website specific for the Crimea
( http://rk-memory.ru/ ) and searched that too, once again fruitlessly.
(I should point out that these sites are in Russian only, which I
don't speak, and using online translations and virtual keyboards to
painstakingly type in Cyrillic letters in various combinations for
searches and then going through results has been like pulling teeth!)

But I don't know if my understanding that these websites are based on
the printed books is correct. And even if it is, I don't how many of
the printed books are actually covered in the websites, or if all the
contents of a book that is in the website are included. Can anyone
shed any light on this subject? How much of a correlation is there
between the printed books and the websites? And if the websites don't
cover all the printed books or all their contents, are they adding
content as time goes on, or staying as they are? Any information would
be most appreciated and I'm sure would be useful for quite a few
people.

Thanking you in advance,
Miriam Bulwar David-Hay,
Raanana, Isael.