Yizker Bikher and the problem of historical veracity: an anthropological approach

The nearly 1,000 memorial books -"yizker bikher" (yizkor books) written primarily by Polish Jews to commemorate their destroyed communities, constitute a vast source of information. The problem addressed in this essay concerns the variety of possible uses of these books by survivors of the communities, by their descendants and other Jews born after ther war, or by scholars of twentieth-century Polish Jewry