| Summary: | The heyday for the development of the non-Orthodox Memorial (Yizkor) Service held on Yom Kippur occurred in the nineteenth century, largely though not exclusively under the sway of the formative Reform rite arranged for the Hamburg Temple. This development was at its richest in the United States in the various prayerbooks published under the patronage of individual congregations, chiefly made up of those who had left Central Europe for the freer atmosphere of America. The Atonement Memorial Service was celebrated then amid much circumstance and solemnity, in ways previously unknown. Not only were Sephardic memorial prayers preferred over the more established Ashkenazic ones, but the service itself was conducted principally in the vernacular, even in synagogues where Hebrew otherwise prevailed. What is perhaps most surprising of all is that the climactic private yizkor prayers in the vernacular, German or English, were as a rule addressed to the departed themselves. Precedents for invoking the deceased in the second person are explored. The nineteenth-century American prayerbooks that are examined are those compiled by Merzbacher, Einhorn, Wise, Huebsch, and Krauskopf, on the Reform side, and those by Szold and Jastrow, of the Positive-Historical (later to become the Conservative) school. In briefer fashion the twentieth-century Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist High Holy Day liturgies in their various stages come in for scrutiny, and revealing comparisons are drawn with their nineteenth-century antecedents, so far as the Memorial Service is concerned. It is by watching the changing styles in the American Yizkor Service on the holiest day in the Jewish calendar that we can begin to realize the extent and direction to which Jewish theological — and psychological too — attitudes toward death, afterlife, and familial ties evolved within the span of a century or so.
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