Early Holocaust Commemoration in the Mexican Yiddish Press

Researchers have explained the importance of Yizkor-Bikher as a collective response to the Holocaust. These early transnational efforts helped landsmashschaftn to memorialise the Jewish communities destroyed during the Holocaust serving as symbolic burials (Kugelmass & Boyarin, 1983).

However, less attention has been given to early commemoration efforts in the Yiddish Press outside occupied Europe, due to the fact that articles trying to memorialise lost Jewish communities are scattered and do not create a cohesive narrative about one specific place.

Nevertheless, such articles give us a unique perspective on early reactions and shared transnational discourses about Jewish catastrophe, shedding light onto mourning processes of individuals who responded to news of the destruction by writing. In contrast to the Yizkor-Bikher, the articles went through a shorter process of editing and were published rapidly. Moreover, the articles were appealing to different audiences beyond their landsmanschaft and written for different reasons.

In this paper I will analyse diverse articles published in the Yiddish Press in Mexico in response to the news about the destruction of European Jewry, news that appeared in the same periodicals only a few days earlier. I will give special attention to the Yiddish Press as a platform that allowed readers to publish their reactions to the destruction whilst framing those reactions in their local context of production but also by using transnational discourses. Amongst other elements I will focus on how writers portrayed their feelings, the meaning they gave to the destruction and how they tried to create a memorial to the destroyed places by means of writing. I will also pay attention to articles that aimed to memorialise diverse places criticising a focus on writing mainly about Polish Jewry. I will understand the Yiddish Press as a contested platform to express their mourning processes.