8 - Going Online to Go ‘Home’: Yizkor Books, Cyber-Shtetls, and Communities of Location

Summary

The production of hereness in the absence of actualities depends increasingly on virtualities.’ (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998: 169)

ONLINE yizkor (memorial) books and shtetls—‘cyber-shtetls’—give access to the places where Jewish life once flourished that are otherwise inaccessible, primarily because of the Holocaust. These resources attract users who seek information about a specific place, generating Jewish communities based on location. These communities draw attention to changes in contemporary Jewish identity formation and the mediation of Jewish social connection in the digital age. Instead of focusing on a Jewish way of life or Jewish lineage, these communities are based on their members’ geographical origin. From as microcosmic an issue as which street in which neighbourhood, to as macrocosmic a concept as the region in which a particular dialect is spoken, the site where a person considers ‘home’ to be leads to a sense of community that may supersede kinship as a defining feature, especially in the wake of the Holocaust when the concept of family changed irrevocably. Accordingly, online yizkor books and cyber-shtetls give people who are searching for ‘home’ a place to go. My contention in this essay is that the space that they occupy on the Web is a surrogate for the real thing.

Benedict Anderson (1991) argues that the metropolitan daily newspaper representing a convergence of market capitalism and print technology emerging at the start of the Industrial Revolution served to forge communities (1991: 25–8). Similarly, with the advent of the Digital Age, cyber-shtetl websites offer users an experience that, to use Anderson's words, is ‘replicated … by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence [they are] confident, yet of whose identity [they have] not the slightest notion’ (1991: 35). The resulting ‘communities of location’ are so salient in Jewish life and culture that Yiddish has a set of words to describe people who come from one geographic place. A person who comes from the same place as another person is called a landsman; the community of people coming from the same place is a landslayt; and an organization of all the people who come from the same place is a landsmanshaft.