May God Remember: Memory and Memorializing in Judaism - Yizkor (Prayers of Awe, 4)

Lawrence A. Hoffman

An engaging and sobering look at memorializing in Judaism and why

memory ours and God's is so central

to the human enterprise.

Few topics exercise the Jewish mind and heart as thoroughly

as memorializing the past, and few prayers on

the High Holy Days attract as many people as does

Yizkor, the Jewish memorial service par excellence.

Yizkor recalls both personal losses and the martyrs

of history. It began as a sobering reflection on the

Jews killed by the Crusaders who destroyed Jewish

communities in the Rhineland on their way to the

Holy Land. Its signature line, Yizkor ("May God

remember"), headed up the memory books in which

Jews listed the names of their dead, with the fervent

hope that God would remember them. Other prayers

followed, including El malei rachamim ("God, full of

compassion"), a response to the Chmielnicki pogroms

in 1648 Ukraine. Jews in the nineteenth century

enlarged this original set of prayers to become the

lengthy and touching service that we have today.

May God Remember provides the history and the

ideas behind this fascinating chapter in Jewish piety.

The fourth volume in the Prayers of Awe series, it

assembles the collective thought of thirty contributors

from all denominations, and from the United

States, Canada, England, France, Germany and Israel.

Appendices provide the Sefardi memorial prayer called

Hashkavah, and a translation and annotation of the

original elegy for the dead in 1648 whose loss spurred

the creation of El malei rachamim, the most famous

of our memorial prayers and a staple for the funeral

liturgy as well. For a complete list of contributors, see

www.jewishlights.com.