Ireneusz Socha

I learned about the existence of Sefer Dembitz in 1999, while scouring the Internet resources in search of materials on Dębica’s Jewish history. JewishGen – an American non-profit genealogical organization, affiliated with Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in New York published on its servers a few chapters of Sefer Dembitz translated from the Hebrew into English. These extraordinary texts were previously unknown to Polish historiographers and I became engrossed in them completely. I decided to translate the book into Polish, as no historian at the time was working to preserve or advocate the memory of Jewish Dębica. To this end, I contacted Joyce Field, who at the time coordinated the Yizkor Books Project, an endeavor to translate all “books of memory” from Central European Kehillas into English and respective national languages and to make them available online for the wide public. I started working on the translation in 2004, when I translated two texts: “The City and its Rabbis” („Dębiccy rabini”) and „The Baking of Matza Shmura” („Pieczenie strzeżonej macy”). As new sections of the book in English were published, I continued working on the Polish translation.

I worked whenever I was free, which is why it took so long, but I finally completed the translation. In the final years I received words of encouragement from Aviva Weintraub, the current coordinator of Yizkor Books Translation Project, who also asked me to pen the preface for the English edition of “Sefer Dembitz”.

Visit “Sefer Dembitz” homepage 
English version of „Sefer Dembitz”