The Yizkor Service

Shalom.

I am Rabbi Jonathan Ginsberg of Habonim, Niles Township Jewish Congregation of Skokie Illinois. This video is to explain the Jewish custom of Yizkor which means memory. We have services four times a year, on Yom Kippur and then on the last day of the three pilgrimage festival, the last day of Passover, and the last of Sukkot, last day of Shavu’ot in which we set aside time and offer prayers for our dead loved ones. This is in addition to the institution of yort side where we commemorate their anniversary of their death by the Hebrew Calendar. The customs of the same were to light a memorial candle for them the day of their yort side or around the sker. And we are also to recite the mourner’s Kaddish in the synagogue three times hopefully, our three different services.

Now, what is the origin of Yizkor? How did it start? Why do we have this institution where we four times a year remember our dead relatives and or other people, our friends and family members. Well, the answer it is not in the bible. It goes back first to mention on the fifth century in our Midrash, a collection of rabbinic, a commentary is called Tanhuma. In later again it is discuss in the Gaunad period by the stages. The great Rabbis of Babylonia, the 8th, 9th, 10th centuries. But it really became famous in the crusades and became statutory in Jewish prayer.

The crusade of course were Pope inspired afterwards by Christian kingdom to liberate the holy land from Muslim infidels, but on the way, the Christians decide that the Jews in Europe were infidel too and massacred many Jews and destroyed many Jewish communities. But the story here really starts in the Rhine land where the devastation and disruption and mass murder was unbelievable in the crusades. And the few surviving Jews of the Rhine land decided that they should remember those citizens of the Rhine land, the Jews who were massacred and murdered by the Christians in the crusades, and so they begin this process of memorial. And then it was not too far stretch for them to say, you know, we should remember our family members too in this Yizkor idea. It slowly started to spread through Europe, and then the great mystique of Rabbi the Aari made a cabbalistic spin on this idea and then it became spread to as fordism, it became part of statutory Jewish prayer.


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