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The JewishGen Yizkor Book Necrology Database

• Introduction
• Contents of the Database
• Updates to the Database
• Finding Sources
• Search the Database

The JewishGen Yizkor Book Necrology Database indexes the names of persons in the necrologies — the lists of Holocaust martyrs — published in the Yizkor Books appearing on the JewishGen Yizkor Book Translation Project.  This database is only an index of names; it directs researchers back to the Yizkor Book itself, where more complete information may be available.

This database allows the surnames to be searched via soundex.  Because most of these names were transliterated from Hebrew and Yiddish, the spellings of the surnames may not be as you are used to seeing them in Latin-alphabet sources.

Region:  

Contents of the Database

This database currently contains over 240,000 entries from the necrologies of 265 different Yizkor Books:

Note that the number of entries listed for each town above does not equal the number of persons memorialized.  Each yizkor book had its own style and format for listing a necrology.  Some necrologies list each person separately on their own line, while many others have each family group recorded as a single record.  Many of the family groups are inexact, such as "Mordche and family", or "Haim, Liba and children", or "Shlomo and wife", or "Feyga and her two sons", etc., so we are not attempting to separate these.  Only the full family group record as a whole unit makes sense, by providing its own context.  Thus the 240,000 entries in this database likely represent over 400,000 individuals, or about 6% of all Holocaust victims.

Updates to the Database

If your town is not in the above list, please consider transcribing the necrology in your ancestral town's Yizkor Book, and submitting it to the Yizkor Book Project so that it can then be added to this ongoing effort.  See the JewishGen Yizkor Book Project's donation procedures.

This database was created with the assistance of Ernie Fine and Max Heffler, who extract the names from the necrologies in the individual Yizkor Book translations and inputs them into Excel spreadsheets, which are then imported into this database.  The fields in the database are:

  • Surname
  • Given Name(s)
  • Town Name, which is linked to the source, the original Yizkor Book where this entry appears.

As approximately 100 new Yizkor Book translations are added to the JewishGen Yizkor Book Project each year, this database will be added to over time.  There are currently over 500 individual translations on the web site, but not all Yizkor Books contain necrologies.

Finding sources

To find the original source, click on the name of the town in the far right column of the displayed table of matching names.  This will lead you to a bibliographic citation of the source Yizkor Book which contains that name.  On that page, which contains full information about that Yizkor Book, there is a field labelled "Translation", which contains a clickable URL to the translated portions of that Yizkor Book on the JewishGen web site.

Note that there most often little or no additional information about each person in the original Yizkor Book.  The necrologies are usually just lists of the names of those remembered, as told by emigrants and survivors to the compilers of the Yizkor Books.

For more information about Yizkor Books, see the JewishGen Yizkor Book Project.

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Last Update: 23 Apr 2011   WSB
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