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 theJews 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.
