In the decades following the Second World War, refugees and survivors residing around the world worked collectively to create commemorative volumes (yizker bikher) dedicated to their shared hometown communities. Each yizker bukh represented a particular village, town, or city and included testimonies, remembrances, poetry, photographs, artwork, folklore, and many other contributions. This talk will introduce this unique genre and its emergence and development in the postwar years. 

Eliyana Adler is a professor of East European Jewish history, with a particular focus on Poland and the USSR, at SUNY Binghamton. Her first book, “In Her Hands: The Education of Jewish Girls in Tsarist Russia” (2011), examined the history of education. Her second book, “Survival on the Margins: Polish Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Union,” followed the experiences of a group of Jewish refugees amid the war and the Holocaust. Currently, she is working on a project about post-Holocaust Jewish memorial books.

About the Series

The Holocaust Living History Workshop (HLHW) series is an education and outreach program co-sponsored by the UC San Diego Library and the Jewish Studies Program. It aims to preserve the memories of the victims and survivors of the Holocaust by offering public events involving witnesses, descendants and scholars and through the use of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute’s Visual History Archive. Past HLHW workshops are now part of the Library’s digital collections and can be accessed online.