Yiddish translation services: how to get old Yiddish and Hebrew letters read

The letters usually turn up after a death, in a drawer or a shoebox, still in their envelopes: thin paper covered edge to edge in a script no one in the family can read. They may be the only words left from relatives who stayed in Europe, and they often name the town and the relatives.

Yiddish translation services for letters like these are small and specialized, and a family that knows what to send and what to ask for gets a better result. This guide explains how to date a letter, who reads them, what it costs and what a full translation should give.

What families find

Most of what turns up falls into a few kinds:

• Letters from parents, brothers and sisters in Poland, Lithuania, Russia, Hungary or Romania to relatives in America, Britain or the Land of Israel, most of them from before 1939, and a second group from the years after 1945.
• Postcards, often a few lines of news and greetings, or a photograph with a dedication written on the back.
• Inscriptions in seforim, where an owner wrote his name inside the cover of a siddur, a chumash or a volume of Gemara, often with his father's name, his town and a date.
• A ketubah, the marriage contract, written in Aramaic, which gives the day and year of the wedding by the Jewish calendar, the town, the names of the groom and bride with their fathers' names, and the signatures of two witnesses.

Family Bibles and seforim with names inside

In many families a Bible holds a record page of births, marriages and deaths, and passes down as an heirloom with the family's own entries in it. In Jewish homes the same record often sits inside the cover of a siddur or a chumash. Treat such a book as a document: copy the record page and the title page, since entries dated before the book was printed were written in later, from memory. A family Bible that has left the family is most often with a cousin, and some have reached state libraries and archives, which keep collections of family Bible records.

How to tell Yiddish from Hebrew

Yiddish and Hebrew are written in the same alphabet, from right to left, so to someone who reads neither they look alike. Yiddish was the everyday language of Ashkenazi Jews in Eastern and Central Europe, built mostly on German, with many words from Hebrew and Aramaic and from Polish and Russian. Hebrew was the language of prayer and religious documents, and from the late 1800s a spoken language again in the Land of Israel.

Words of Hebrew origin inside a Yiddish letter, such as a date or a blessing, keep their Hebrew spelling, so a reader of Hebrew can usually make out those pieces and not the rest.

The Yiddish alphabet and script

Family letters were usually written in the Ashkenazi cursive, a quick hand used for Yiddish and Hebrew for centuries, whose letters look little like the square letters printed in a siddur. Every writer had his own habits, and many spelled as they spoke, so a reader needs to know both the hand and the period.

What the spelling tells you

The spelling itself can help date a letter. Yiddish had no single standard until the YIVO rules of the mid-1930s, and German-style spellings were common in the 1800s, though some Orthodox writers kept them long after. In the Soviet Union, from the 1920s, words of Hebrew origin were spelled out as they sounded, and later the special final forms of letters were dropped too, so a letter written that way most likely comes from the Soviet Union in or after the 1920s.

Many letters open with the initials B"H at the top, for baruch Hashem, blessed is God, or b'ezras Hashem, with God's help, or with BS"D, Aramaic for "with the help of Heaven". Writers often began with a Hebrew greeting before turning to Yiddish.

How to date a letter from its postmark and form

Many letters carry a date, often by the Jewish calendar or by the week's Torah reading. Others carry none, and the envelope or the form of the letter gives it instead.

The Jewish year begins in September or early October, so a Hebrew year always spans two ordinary years.

How to get a letter read and translated, step by step

1. Keep every letter in its envelope and in the order it was found, and throw nothing away, including envelopes without letters and scraps that look blank.
2. Number each letter and envelope lightly in soft pencil on the back, near the edge, and keep a list of the numbers.
3. Write down the names and towns the family already knows, and who received the letters.
4. Have copies made of every page, both sides, and of the front and back of every envelope, at 300 dots per inch at least and 400 for small or faint writing, with each file named by the letter's number and page.
5. Send a damaged or brittle letter to a conservator before anyone unfolds it, and keep the originals at home.
6. Choose a translator who reads the handwriting of the period, and send one letter first as a sample, with a request for a quote for the rest.
7. Ask for the full translation set out as described below, with every name, place and date noted and the doubtful words marked.
8. Store the originals flat in acid-free folders in a cool, dry room, and give each branch of the family a set of the copies and translations.

A conservator is a specialist who treats the original paper; the American Institute for Conservation lists its members by specialty and place in its directory. What to do with old family photos and papers covers storage and copies in more detail.

Who reads and translates old letters

These institutions keep lists of translators who read the hand of the period, and none of them translates family letters itself.

• YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, in New York, keeps a list of freelance translators, several of whom specialize in handwritten family letters. YIVO says the translators are not its employees, and that it takes no responsibility for their fees or the quality of their work.
• The Yiddish Book Center, in Amherst, Massachusetts, keeps a list of freelance translators, cross-listed by specialty, including experts in handwritten material and translators who read Hebrew as well as Yiddish.
• The Leo Baeck Institute, for German-Jewish families, refers people to the Ackman and Ziff Genealogy Institute at the Center for Jewish History in New York, which keeps lists of translators for German, Yiddish and Hebrew.
• JewishGen publishes a list of professional translators who work on yizkor books in Hebrew and Yiddish. Its ViewMate is a free exchange where researchers post a copy of a short document and others offer a reading.

A rav can often read the Hebrew in a sefer or a ketubah, and an older relative who grew up with Yiddish may read a clear hand. For a whole bundle, a translator who reads such letters every day will notice what a casual reader misses, such as a nickname or a town's Yiddish name.

Archives and resources for Jewish historical research

The same institutions hold much of the written record of Jewish life in Europe and America. The Center for Jewish History in New York houses five partner organizations with their archives, YIVO and the Leo Baeck Institute among them. JewishGen indexes records country by country, and the Arolsen Archives and Yad Vashem hold the names and files of the war years. The records themselves, country by country, are in finding family records.

What translation costs

Few translators publish their prices. These are the published rates we could find for Yiddish, each from the translator's own page.

Prices as each translator publishes them; none states a turnaround time. Confirm on the translator's own page before sending work.

At these rates a two-page letter of about 400 words in a clear hand costs about $70 to $90, and thirty such letters about $2,100 to $2,500, with more for faded ink or a hard hand. In a Zichronos commission, translation is included; what a family history book costs sets out what each kind of service includes.

What a full translation should give

A summary helps sort the letters, and a family history needs the whole text.

In a finished family history, translated documents are set out beside the original records, with translations and source notes, as the pages on Inside a book show.

Hebrew document translation and certified translations

Many people who look for Hebrew translation services need a different job: a certified English translation of a modern document, such as an Israeli birth or marriage certificate, for an immigration or court filing. For a filing with US Citizenship and Immigration Services, the regulation requires every document in another language to come with a full English translation, certified by the translator as complete and accurate, and a statement that the translator is competent in both languages.

The American Translators Association keeps a directory of its members by language for work of this kind. Old family letters rarely need certification unless they are filed as evidence, for example in an application for citizenship by descent; ask a lawyer what the filing requires.

From the letters to the records

A translated letter is often the start of a search. The names of brothers and sisters, the town, a wedding or a death mentioned in passing all lead to registers that can confirm them. Some of these records can be searched from home. Others are held by archives that answer only written requests, in Polish, German, Russian or Yiddish, and some files have never been indexed at all.

A Zichronos commission includes that work and its archive, copy and translation fees, reads the family's own letters in full, and ends in a finished book with each document shown and translated. How to check a record against the original explains the method, and how the example was researched follows it from the first papers. The examples page shows what a finished book holds, and How we work sets out the steps.

Sources: YIVO's translators list and its essay on Yiddish and Hebrew spelling; the Yiddish Book Center's translators page; the Leo Baeck Institute's questions page; JewishGen's introduction to the Jewish calendar; Chabad.org on B"H and on the text of the ketubah; the Jewish Museum Berlin on Red Cross letters; the Library of Congress on scanning personal collections; 8 CFR 103.2(b)(3); and each translator's own page. Checked October 2026.