These Irreplaceable Yiddish Artifacts Would Have Been Lost to History If They Weren’t Evacuated to New York After World War II
The founding of a research institute 100 years ago has helped to provide insight on Yiddish culture in the United States and around the world
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One Tuesday evening in the spring of 1925, some 30 Jewish scholars and activists met in the Eastern European city of Vilna to discuss the possibility of establishing an academic institute to support the study and preservation of Yiddish language and culture. As the primary language for the Ashkenazic Jews who had been living in Central and Eastern Europe for roughly 1,000 years, Yiddish was not only a linguistic bond but also a cultural foundation for millions of people around the world in the 1920s.
Six months prior, Nokhem Shtif, a prominent linguist and activist based in Berlin, had sparked this idea with his proposal for a combination library, university and academy that might promote research, train scholars and collect materials in Yiddish. Shtif had tried first to entice colleagues in Berlin and then in New York to establish this institute, but without success.
Yet those who gathered 100 years ago in Vilna—particularly the literary scholars Max Weinreich and Zalmen Reyzen—were intrigued enough to approve Shtif’s proposal and then to create a committee that produced a formal plan, “Vilna Theses About a Yiddish Scholarly Institute.” The result later that year was the Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut, or Yiddish Scientific Institute, known as YIVO (its Yiddish acronym), headquartered in Vilna. Today, it is the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, a Smithsonian Affiliate headquartered in New York. YIVO in October 1925 established an American Section of the Yiddish Scientific Institute in New York. This became the organization’s temporary headquarters in 1940 and then later its permanent headquarters during World War II.
With an assortment of art, audio recordings, films, literature, memoirs, music, photographs, theater and more, the YIVO Archives are the world’s largest collection of materials relating to Eastern European Jewish and Yiddish culture. More recently, YIVO has digitized millions of records, provided Yiddish language instruction, and built out an online museum, currently with two exhibitions, and its online educational series, currently with five free, self-directed classes.
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“For decades I have felt that the YIVO was a kind of anchor,” says Samuel Kassow, a historian at Trinity College, in a statement. “It was there that I connected with Dina Abramowicz and Lucjan Dobroszycki, Holocaust survivors whose love of Yiddish and Jewish history helped set me on my scholarly path. And I can’t imagine how I would have written anything without the YIVO Archives. The YIVO is our precious link to a world that was destroyed but whose spirit and values live on in all of us.”
In the 1920s, Vilna—now known as Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania—was one of the world’s leading centers of Jewish life and culture. Roughly one-third of the city’s around 170,000 inhabitants were Jewish, and they established numerous synagogues and educational institutions. YIVO prospered there, largely as Shtif, Weinreich and Reyzen had envisioned. The organization deployed amateur collectors, called zamlers, to gather and conserve a massive treasury of Jewish everyday life—artifacts, folklore, manuscripts, photographs and much more—from communities in Poland and throughout Europe and other parts of the world where Eastern European Jewish culture emerged. YIVO established a training program for aspiring teachers and social workers and promoted research by publishing more than 100 scholarly studies in the social sciences and humanities from 1925 to 1940.
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However, World War II saw the physical destruction of YIVO’s headquarters and a huge loss of Yiddish materials. Between 1939 and 1944, Vilna fell at different times to both Soviet and Nazi forces. The Nazis even deployed a special unit to ransack YIVO’s archives, shipping many treasured materials to its Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question in Frankfurt and intending to shred what it did not plunder. But many of the Jewish workers assigned to select documents, later known as “The Paper Brigade,” hid materials on their bodies and brought them to hiding places in Vilna’s Jewish ghetto. Following World War II, the Lithuanian librarian Antanas Ulpis saved many of those hidden documents from the Soviets, who had illegally annexed the country in 1944. Meanwhile, members of the U.S. Army’s Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives unit (better known as the “Monuments Men”) recovered some of what the Nazis had shipped to Frankfurt.
Because YIVO had a New York location, the treasures saved during the war found a new home in the United States. Millions of pages, including one-of-a-kind artifacts such as teenager Yitskhok Rudashevski’s wartime diary, made their way from Europe to New York into the YIVO Archives and Library collections, which now boast some 24 million items.
YIVO’s move to New York not only saved a portion of its collections from destruction but also helped to document some of the ways that Yiddish culture from Eastern Europe influenced the history and culture of the United States. For instance, YIVO’s Jewish Labor and Political Archives consists of 3.5 million document pages. Some of the materials in these archives highlight the key leadership roles played by Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe in American labor unions, particularly in the textile industry. In each case, as the documents show, Jewish immigrants helped the unions better acknowledge and connect with the needs of their workers.
Another example is the symbiotic relationship between Yiddish theaters on New York’s Lower East Side and Broadway productions in theaters further uptown. Yiddish actors, playwrights and set designers frequently “crossed over” to Broadway, and they almost as frequently returned to the Yiddish theaters downtown. The mainstream English-language press reviewed Yiddish plays as early as 1884, including a reviewer for the Sun, who praised Yiddish theater in 1907 for “the force, passion and, above all, the temperament that the American drama of today seems more conspicuously to lack.” Yiddish actors in the early 20th century, such as Jacob P. Adler and Bertha Kalich, found success on Broadway stages. Broadway producers adapted and translated works by Yiddish playwrights, such as Sholem Aleichem, Peretz Hirschbein, David Pinski and Sholem Asch—the father of Moses Asch, founder of the record label that became Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.
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Much of this history appears in YIVO’s Sidney Krum Jewish Music and Yiddish Theater Memorial Collections, which contain more than 15,000 recordings on CDs, LPs, 78s, piano rolls and tapes. It also holds printed scores and sheet music from an immense repertory that includes art songs, folk songs, instrumental music, liturgical music, operettas, oratorios and pop songs.
YIVO is also preserving Jewish American food history, from bagels and lox to corned beef and other deli sandwiches. Although initially regarded as simple cuisine found almost exclusively in Jewish immigrant neighborhoods, Jewish food in the second half of the 20th century became part of the public and pop-culture imagination in the United States. YIVO offers a course exploring Jewish food history, “A Seat at the Table: A Journey into Jewish Food,” which features experts such as Joan Nathan, author of King Solomon’s Table: A Culinary Exploration of Jewish Cooking From Around the World; Michael Twitty, author of Koshersoul: The Faith and Food Journey of an African American Jew; and Michael Wex, author of Rhapsody in Schmaltz: Yiddish Food and Why We Can’t Stop Eating It. The collections hold dozens of cookbooks and recipe lists from Jewish communities around the world, including one that traces back to the institute’s roots: the 1938 Vilna Vegetarian Cookbook by Fania Lewando, who ran a vegetarian restaurant in prewar Vilna.
YIVO’s extensive materials on everything from labor to theater to food demonstrate how Nokhem Shtif’s innovative proposal for a Yiddish academic institute 100 years ago has not only helped to preserve Yiddish culture from Europe, but also helped us better understand the evolution and diversity of the Jewish American experience. “For 100 years, YIVO has preserved the legacy of 1,000 years of Ashkenazi Jewish life,” says Jonathan Brent, YIVO’s executive director and CEO, in a statement. “YIVO’s collections, programming and educational initiatives tell the story of what we have cherished, what we have endured and how we have persisted. It is the story from which the future of the Jewish people will be built.”
