The commandment zachor – remember – appears throughout Jewish tradition. How do yizker bikher transform this liturgical and spiritual obligation into a physical, collaborative act? Does encoding memory within an object change what remembering means?

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Rich describes these books as sacred objects. What makes an object sacred in Jewish life? Do you think a yizker bukh belongs in the same category as other, more traditional, sacred objects, or is it something different?

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The book’s title frames yizker bikher as “paper tombs” – matzeyvot for people who do not have graves. In Jewish tradition, visiting a grave and placing a stone is a physical act of remembrance. What does it mean when the matzeyve is a book? Can reading become an act of remembrance?

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Yizker bikher record the vibrant Jewish life of prewar Eastern Europe. Why do you think survivors insisted on documenting the ordinary everyday alongside the catastrophic? What is it that we should remember?

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The illustrations in yizker bikher communicate ideas that transcend words. Where else in Jewish life does visual art carry memory or meaning? Why might image and poetry have felt necessary to the survivors who made the memorial books?

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Yizker bikher were written collectively by people from the same town. What does their collaborative authorship say about Jewish memory as a communal rather than individual project? How does that differ from the survivor memoirs we more commonly read?

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We are living through the transition from lived memory to inherited memory, as the last survivors leave us. What role can yizker bikher play once the survivor generation has passed? What are our obligations to these books?

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