I recently learned about Yizkor books, books published after the Holocaust by survivors of specific towns and cities about their communities. I was surprised by how much information they held, detailing the history of their community, its various cultural, political and religious organizations, as well as what happened to its people. Are they viewed as generally trustworthy sources? Do they provide information that is often not found in prewar texts? Are the list of victims in these books a major source for lists at Holocaust museums like Yad Vashem? Any information would be greatly appreciated.
For anyone not familiar with them, here is a digital collection of the originals and here is a source for partial translations.
I am currently working with survivor testimony as a Yiddish translator and Yizkor books are amazing sources. They are generally viewed pretty similarly to oral histories and survivor testimony, which are taken very seriously particularly in modern Holocaust scholarship. Yizkor books are especially useful as a starting point for historians doing in depth local histories, especially of small shtetls. One of the main issues many scholars have is that almost all are in Yiddish and relatively few have been fully translated, and Yiddish is not a widely read language, though scholars are increasingly taught Yiddish in Jewish studies and Holocaust studies degrees. They are definitely used in scholarly papers, it's certainly preferred to have other sources, either testimony or documentation, to back up what's written in Yizkor books, but generally they're treated as quite accurate. Though they are certainly one source of names for lists of Holocaust victims, they are only one of a wide variety of ways such museums have gathered names of victims. Other resources come from survivors, from sources gathered after the war, from perpetrator sources, etc.