YIVO Institute for Jewish Research

YIVO to hold Milstein Conference on “New York and the American Jewish Experience” on November 2, 2009

(New York City, NY) The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research announced an all-day public conference on New York and the American Jewish Experience, funded by the Milstein Family Foundation and the Howard and Abby Milstein Foundation, to be held on Monday, November 2. The conference, which marks the culmination of three years of intensive work on the Milstein Family Jewish Communal Archive Project, will celebrate the history of Jewish life in the New York area, emphasize the achievements of Jewish communal organizations, and highlight the treasures of Jewish archives. The program will feature a discussion by New York Jewish community leaders of agencies which collaborated in the Milstein Project and papers by scholars on a wide variety of political, social and cultural issues. A panel of professional archivists will discuss the rich resources found in local Jewish archives and the challenges faced in their preservation for the future.

The Milstein Family Jewish Communal Archive Project is carried out by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in collaboration with the 92nd Street Y, the Educational Alliance, F·E·G·S Health and Human Service System, NYANA and Surprise Lake Camp, and is sponsored by the Milstein Family Foundation and the Howard & Abby Milstein Foundation. The participating agencies are affiliates of UJA Federation of New York. Archival repositories participating in the conference include the 92nd Street Y Archives, American Jewish Committee Archives, the Hadassah Archives, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) Archives, the JDC Archives, the Yeshiva University Archives, and the YIVO Archives.

Founded in 1925, in Vilna (Wilno, Poland; now Vilnius, Lithuania) as the Yiddish Scientific Institute, YIVO is dedicated to the study of the history and culture of Ashkenazic Jewry and its influence in the Americas. Headquartered in New York City since 1940, today YIVO is the preeminent global resource center for East European Jewish Studies; Yiddish language, literature and ethnography; and the American Jewish immigrant experience. The YIVO Library holds over 385,000 volumes; the Archives holds about 20 million archival items.