Colorado: Yizkor books for Jewish family history, January 30

Yizkor books are an important component of Jewish family history, providing information on families in and history of towns and cities impacted by the Holocaust.

The Jewish Genealogical Society of Colorado will focus on Yizkor books when it hosts University of Maryland doctoral candidate Rachel Leah Jablon on Sunday, January 30.

The program begins at 10am at Congregation Har Shem, 3950 Baseline Road, South Building, in Boulder.

Jablon's program is titled "Yizkor Books: Required Reading for Reseaching Jewish Family History."

Yizkor books, or Jewish memorial books, offer Jewish genealogists a goldmine of information on ancestors, places of origin, religious movements, industrial trends, and Holocaust history. This presentation will cover the history and historiography of Yizkor books: what they are, when they came to be, where they come from, why they were published, who put them together, and how to use them. Because Yizkor books are hard to obtain, we will primarily use the Internet to "page through" digital, scanned-in versions of Yizkor books and their translations. A list of repositories which hold Yizkor books around the world will be provided. If you have any Yizkor books, please bring them to the presentation to show.

Jablon's dissertation - "Digital Legacies: Community, the Holocaust, and the Internet" - examines the influence of Jewish genealogy on Holocaust memorialization, especially in an online environment. She served as Denver University's Posen Visiting Lecturer of Secular Jewish Culture in 2006 and as the Holocaust Awareness Institute's Scholar-in-Residence in 2007.

For more information and directions visit the JGSCo website.