About This Project
Pinkos Bialystok is not a typical Yizkor Book. It was written by one author, Abraham S. Hershberg and is a fully researched and documented scholarly history of Jewish Białystok from the very beginnings of the community in the 16th and 17th Centuries up through the mid-1930s; and was completed before World War II.
Pinkos Bialystok was published by the Białystok Jewish Historical Association in New York in 1949-1950 in two volumes: volume one is 480 pages; volume two, 380 pages. The Yiddish manuscript survived the liquidation of the Białystok Ghetto, although its author – Abraham Hershberg – did not survive.
BIALYGen, the Białystok Region Jewish Genealogy Group, has translated the detailed Tables of Contents of both volumes of this work, which will be placed online.
Historical Significance
Many such books have been published for Białystok (see the Białystok community page) and The Bialystok Memorial Book, published in New York in 1982, is online
Pinkos Bialystok is different. It does not have any first-hand narratives of life before, during, and after the Holocaust written by survivors. It has no lists of Holocaust victims or survivors. It has no stories of heroism and destruction during World War II. However, this book does have historical information, profiles of historical figures and institutions, and discussions of historical events concerning the Jewish community of Bialystok from its beginnings in the 16th and 17th Centuries through the mid 1930s.
Project Details
Pinkos Bialystok is a book written in the style of a scholarly history textbook, not a typical yizkor book. Our plan is to translate the entire two-volume work of about 860 pages, which is organized into 30 chapters and three appendices containing a total 220 sections (sub-chapters).
To accomplish that, JewishGen will hire a professional translator. The project coordinator will work closely with the translator to ensure a grammatically correct and idiomatic translation. The project coordinator will perform specific tasks including proofreading, editing, and preparing the work for submission to the Yizkor Book Project. The expected cost of translation may be higher than the cost for most yizkor books because it is written as a scholarly work and uses many unfamiliar Yiddish and Hebrew terms.
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