THE PARYSOW PROJECT
STUDENTS: JOIN THE NEXT BOOK
SAVE THE MEMORY OF SALONIKA,
"Jerusalem of the Balkans"
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.
