THE PARYSOW PROJECT
STUDENTS: JOIN THE NEXT BOOK
SAVE THE MEMORY OF VILNA, LITHUANIA
The Parysow Project is an international translation effort to rescue the hundreds of Holocaust memorial books from their dying dialect of Yiddish, and preserve them for future generations.
It is named for the town of Parysow, whose memorial book was translated by the young women of Hasmonean High School for Girls, as the project’s founding publication.
After the Holocaust,
survivors from all over Europe gathered together to record their memories of the people and towns they had lost, and to document how they had lost them, so that their loss would be the last of that magnitude.
These memories were collated in over 2,000 memorial or “Yizkor” books, one for each town that could gather enough survivors.
They wrote these memories in the lingua franca of Jews of that era, Yiddish, to be sure that Jews anywhere would always be able to read these stories, to connect with their lost roots.
Unfortunately, outside of certain communities, the richness of Yiddish has been lost to most of today’s Jews. Those books, written for posterity, gather dust on library shelves.
In 2021, the young women of Hasmonean High School for Girls, in London, discovered these books. Although not one of them spoke Yiddish, they committed themselves to saving the memory of one small shtetl: Parysow.
It is our fervent hope that you will read these pages and come to realize, as we have, that each of the 6 million lost, from the Chief Rabbi to the water carrier, was a vibrant, spiritual soul, with stories to tell, and with lessons for all of us… lessons that today exist only within these pages.
We hope that you may be inspired to help. We still have over 2000 books left to translate. If a high school student with no knowledge of Yiddish can do it, then you can, too.
To save a memory is to save a life, a soul.
"I am the only survivor of my whole family. I do not have a picture of my loved ones. I carry them with me in my memory, in my reality, and in my dreams."
- Chaya Lederman, Parysow
PROJECTS
The autobiography of a survivor of the Parysow Ghetto during the Holocaust. With the help of Jews and gentiles, Abraham Gutrejman escapes and perseveres to establish a family of his own, on a journey that takes him from postwar Polish wastelands to the rainforests of Costa Rica.
The first of hundreds of Yizkor books to be rescued from a dying dialect of Yiddish by the volunteers of The Parysow Project.
The story of the life and death of the Polish shtetl of Parysow, as witnessed by the survivors of its destruction.
The next generation of translators at Hasmonean High School for Girls has taken upon themselves to save the memory of the shtetl of Vilna, Lithuania.
For the translation of the hundreds of remaining Yiddish-language Yizkor books, to preserve them for posterity.