Working out of her home in Woodland Hills, Calif., professional genealogist Ann Gleich Harris pores over the Yiddish and Hebrew text from a scanned 500-page Yizkor book memorializing the Ukrainian shtetl of Zborov. Amid a renewed interest in these memorial books thanks largely to the burgeoning field of Jewish genealogy, Harris is one of hundreds of dedicated volunteer translators and editors worldwide who spend untold hours making these works accessible to English speakers. 

Yizkor books were compiled by survivors after World War II in an effort to document Jewish life before the war as well as provide firsthand accounts of the Holocaust and its aftermath. Most were printed by small associations and committees of survivors, partly for their own use in reciting Kaddish for their murdered landsmen. Vital records perished in most of these communities, so Jewish genealogists today have come to rely on Yizkor books to fill in important details, such as familial names and relationships.

There are approximately 1,500 physical copies of Yizkor books housed in libraries and collections in Israel and across the Diaspora. To date, about a quarter have been translated into English and are accessible online through organizations and institutions such as the Yiddish Book Center, the New York Public Library, Yad Vashem and JewishGen.

Harris’s task is a labor of love. Her paternal relatives once thrived in Zborov, where Jews were murdered en masse during the Holocaust by the Germans, with the assistance of locals. Nearly a century later, she serves as the project manager for translating the Zborov Yizkor book for JewishGen, one of the leading search engines and repositories for Jewish genealogical records.

“I undertook this work in order to honor and perpetuate the memory of the Jews of the shtetls and to raise a memorial to those who were brutally murdered by the Nazis,” Harris said. “It is also my way of honoring my own ancestors.”

Harris is uniquely qualified for the task. She reads Hebrew and Yiddish, and her expertise in genealogy has led her to uncover distant branches on her own family tree as well as those of others.

As project manager, Harris edits and proofreads the work of three translators. She also focuses on translating names and places in addition to working on necrologies, which in Yizkor books are lists of townsfolk killed in the Holocaust.

“In doing this work, I honor the lives of families who tragically are no longer alive,” she said. “It is gratifying to have a profound effect on others who are looking for their own roots—people I may never meet or even know about.”

Sherrill Kushner