Shavuot starts Sunday evening. It was a tradition for the Stratin Hassidim, who were active in eastern Galicia from 1820 until the Holocaust, to travel from their towns to visit the Rabbi from Belz an

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As I mentioned yesterday, Pew Research Center has a follow up post to the report on Jewish-Americans it issue earlier this week. Jews in U.S. are far less religious than Christians and Americans overa

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There will be several more posts in the next few weeks based on this survey, the next one scheduled for tomorrow comparing the religiosity of Jewish-Americans compared to Americans of other faiths. It

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“Letters from Dotnuva” in Lithuania is not a Yizkor book but is part of JewishGen’s Yizkor book collection. They provide a unique and very personal account of an extended family, some of whom remained

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Here are two examples from Yizkor books that describe occupations https://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/sopotskin/sop024.html https://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/slutsk/slu041.htm Bruce Drake Silver Spring MD

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Many Yizkor books have chapters on this very subject. Unfortunately, for those towns you named that have books, I did not see one. Bruce Drake Silver Spring MD

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Jews during the Nazi occupation faced death in multiple ways: in the ghettos where aktions loomed, in the fields outside the ghetto where Germans and other enemies hunted them and aboard transports ta

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One topic common to many Yizkor books is a description of the town’s market day. Market days were a vital part of the economy on which people depended for the earnings that would carry them through th

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I have learned a lot from doing these weekly explorations of Yizkor books over several years, but I occasionally come across stories that stump me, due no doubt because I don’t pretend any expertise i

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“The Story of Kopel Percowicz” is one of the accounts included in a long chapter titled “Tales of Tykocin Holocaust Survivors” from that Polish town’s Yizkor book. Percowicz details the hardships and

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“The Forest Girl, “ a chapter from the Yizkor book of Mizoch, Ukraine is an account of Kayla Goldberg-Tzizin’s journey of survival as the town’s ghetto was about to be destroyed. It is a story of emot

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Passover begins tomorrow evening, so it’s fitting to offer this account of the holiday from the Yizkor book of Ciechanowiec, Poland. The rituals — from the cleaning of homes, the sale of any leavened

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In this chapter from the Yizkor book of book of Zloczew, Poland, Israel Katz relates this scene from a wedding: the bride among her women friends while in the next room, there were only men, speaking

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I often come across chapters in Yizkor books that are clearly fables, or at least, probably not entirely accurate accounts of real events. True or not, the common thread is that they shine a different

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Yes, I have experienced the same thing along with a fellow JewishGen member researching our family. In once case, the person in question had only a tangential connection to our family and nothing of v

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Yizkor books are full of accounts of Jews who sought to escape ghettos when it became increasingly clear that the people in them would be exterminated in an aktion or sent on trains to the death camps

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Elise If any of these helps, here are URLs to four Yizkor book chapters involving wedding customs: https://www.facebook.com/JewishGen.org/posts/2192578187430991?__tn__=K-R https://www.facebook.com/Jew

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“The Testimony of Rudolph Rader” from the Yizkor book of Skalat (Ukraine) is a first person account of Belzec, the Nazi concentration camp in Poland. While the horrors he relates make difficult readin

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Thanks to the help of Lance Ackerfeld and Nancy Siegel, there is now a searchable archive of past postings of the weekly excerpts. There is still a gap for a month in 2019 and several months of early

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Purim is next Friday, the joyous holiday that celebrates the saving of the Jews from a threatened massacre in ancient Persia. (So joyous that the Yizkor book of Klobuck, Poland notes that during the h

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