YIVO Vilna Project Will Digitize Jewish History

It’s an exciting time for Yiddish scholarship. The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research has announced the start of its YIVO Vilna Project, a $5.25 million, 15-year endeavor to unite, at long last, a collection of treasured documents that has been separated by an ocean for half a century .

The newly combined archive—half in New York, half in Vilnius, Lithuania—will include 10,000 rare or unique publications and plenty of primary sources: 1.5 million letters, memoirs, and photographs that were rescued when the Nazis ransacked YIVO’s Vilna archive, murdering most of its scholars and students, in 1941. After the Nazi raids, a portion of these documents were transplanted to YIVO’s new headquarters in New York with the help of the U.S. Army. Others were destroyed, and the rest, hidden for decades by Lithuanian librarians, resurfaced in 1989.

“This is is good news for scholars and profoundly gratifying to those who love and respect YIVO’s tradition of engaged Jewish scholarship,” says historian Daniel Soyer of Fordham University. “Since it was founded in Vilna in 1925, YIVO has been a nearly inexhaustible source of both information and inspiration concerning the history and culture of Eastern European Jews in Eastern Europe, America, and elsewhere. There is no other collection like it for its depth and scope.”

Autobiography and memoir—Yiddish-language records of the everyday lives of pre-war citizens in their own words—are an integral part of the YIVO Vilna collection. These documents offer the kind of frank and introspective details about ordinary life that are unavailable in polished works by professional writers. In the 1930′s YIVO sponsored contests for Jewish youth in Poland to write autobiographies documenting their daily lives. These first-person accounts provide a window into a culture now lost. About 300 of the original 627 autobiographies survived.

Continuing in tradition of sponsoring autobiography contest, newly-emigrated YIVO scholars in New York held a 1942 essay contest on the theme “Why I left Europe and what I have accomplished in America.” Over 200 recent immigrants responded, generating 25,000 document pages, mostly in Yiddish, with material covering all aspects of their lives, both in the old country and the new.