Sign up for Weekday J and get the latest on what's happening in the Jewish Bay Area.

Each of the books — there are an estimated 800 to 1,000 — is a compilation of writings by survivors from towns like Kobrin. Over the last 18 years, the S.F.-based Holocaust Center of Northern California has amassed the largest collection on the West Coast, with copies of nearly 500 of the rare books.

Last month, the center began a project to copy the collection onto microform, having received a partial grant from the New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.

Generally, the manuscripts are written in either Yiddish or Hebrew. However, included in the San Francisco collection is an English translation of the 406-page Kobrin volume that the center published. Originally published in Tel Aviv in 1951, it features vintage photographs and dozens of accounts covering daily life, history and notable local personalities.

Chapters include "Purim Actors in Kobrin," "Our Town in the Mirror of the Press" and "The Youngsters of the Yeshiva."

A particularly vivid section, written by former resident Joseph Schwartz, is titled "A Passover Evening in the Alleys of `Mitzraim.'" Mitzraim is the Hebrew word for Egypt.

"As old people whose backs are now crooked under the oppressing yoke so look the shaky homes who seemed to be ready to fall from any light wind and are sinking in the mud," Schwartz wrote. "They are connected and close to one another like neglected orphans who are trying to find cover from the cold and rain."

In its new format, the material will become more accessible to historians and institutions.

"People doing genealogy want to get their hands on them because they're very hard to come by," said Ali Cannon, the center's program director. "The books are pretty fragile and they were published in small lots. In large part, they're the only surviving record of Jewish life and culture in those communities.

"They're magical in a way," she added. "People always mention the 6 million Jews who were killed, but what's overlooked was a way of life that was lost. We're talking about Jewish history and culture spanning centuries that was wiped out. That's why these books are so valuable."

The books are part memoir, part scrapbook. The Kobrin volume includes a map of the town, historical chronicles broken down by years (1904 to 1913), lists of known survivors and those killed, profiles of religious and secular organizations and institutions, and personal reflections.

"What's incredible about the photographs in the yizkor books is that they show a wide range of Jewish life in the town — from Jewish day school classes to Bundes [Jewish socialist] organizations to athletic team shots," said Cannon.

San Francisco resident Lonny Darwin, one of the center's founders and a current board member, donated a major portion of the collection after acquiring the books in Israel.

Jerusalem's Yad Vashem Holocaust center has the largest collection of yizkor books in the world.

The only other yizkor book the San Francisco center has translated into English is a short one about Kosow Lacki, a Polish town six miles from Treblinka.

That book was compiled by Rivka and Moshe Barlev, originally from Kosow Lacki. The Barlevs, who lived in Palestine during the Holocaust, located three survivors of the town in 1976 and began meeting with two of them.

"We learn from them something of what happened in our shtetl," they wrote in the foreword. "These meetings, which form the basis of this yizkor, were very emotional, and we often had to stop to catch our breath."

Pictures of people sitting on stoops along narrow, cobblestone streets make it easy to imagine life in Kosow before the war.

While the town was 85 percent Jewish, wrote translator Oscar Berland, "The church, the statue [of St. Mary], the bell-ringing every Sunday morning, was a reminder that no matter how many Jews lived in this town, and no matter how many centuries they had lived here, Kosow was Polish and Catholic and the Jews were outsiders."

The yizkor books are worth looking through, Cannon said, if only for the photos. "People are able to look and find family members," she said. "Most of them were published for the benefit of the survivors of those communities.

"Survivors weren't able to go back home, so these books were passed down in families."