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History
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YIVO
was founded as the Yiddish Scientific Institute (Yidisher visnshaftlekher
institut) in 1925 by scholars in Berlin and Vilna (Pol. Wilno, Lith.
Vilnius), Poland. The scholars, who envisioned an academic institution dedicated
to the study of Yiddish and East European Jewish culture, chose Vilna, then
an important center of Yiddish culture, as its site. The new institute soon
became known by its acronym, "YIVO." Today, YIVO is formally known as the
YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.
Though they lived in swiftly changing times, YIVO's founders had faith
in the continuity of Jewish culture. They approached the study of both
the past and the present from a modern perspective, aiming at the highest
standards of scholarly objectivity. YIVO was soon known worldwide for
the quality and originality of its scholarship. During its first fifteen
years of existence, the institute published over one hundred volumes of
research studies in the social sciences and humanities.
YIVO was embraced not only by scholars, but also by ordinary Jews, who
saw the institute as a focus of national pride. Amateur zamlers
(collectors) from all over Poland, other European countries, and the Americas
gathered books, manuscripts, photographs, posters, snippets of folklore,
and other artifacts and sent them to YIVO, proud to be taking part in
building a national treasury of Jewish culture. Their contributions helped
YIVO amass an important library
and archives, which today constitute the world's largest collection
of materials relating to the history of East European Jewry.
One reason for YIVO's popularity with the public was the institute's
commitment to using Yiddish,
the everyday language of East European Jews, as its official language
for business and scholarship. YIVO's founders and activists considered
the development of scholarship in Yiddish as the vehicle for the cultural
and spiritual blossoming of the Jewish people. YIVO ran special courses
for teachers from Yiddish-language schools. It developed standards
for Yiddish spelling and transliteration which are still widely in
use today.
The Jews assigned by the Nazis to sort through the archival and library materials risked their lives to hide rare artifacts. Calling themselves "the Paper Brigade," they smuggled books and papers to hiding places in the Jewish ghetto and in the homes of friendly non-Jews. They concealed documents under floorboards and in walls and buried them in secret underground bunkers. Some members of the Paper Brigade were also members of the Vilna ghetto's Jewish resistance organization. They saw the rescue of Jewish cultural treasures as no less a holy mission than that of mounting an armed uprising against the Nazis. (For more information about this chapter in YIVO's history, consult David E. Fishman's booklet, Embers Plucked From The Fire. For a list of YIVO publications currently in print, click here.) Meanwhile, YIVO director Max Weinreich, who had been on trip outside Poland at the start of World War II, had managed to temporarily reestablish YIVO in new headquarters in New York. As the war drew to a close, and the magnitude of the Nazi genocide was revealed, it became clear that the relocation of YIVO to the United States would be permanent.
YIVO in the United States—1940s-1980s In 1947, with the help of the U.S. Army, YIVO managed to recover some of the materials the Nazis had confiscated in Vilna and shipped to Germany. A few other items were smuggled out of Vilna to New York by Abraham Sutzkever, Szmerke Kaczerginski, and other Paper Brigade survivors who had returned to Vilna after the war. As the Soviets began an intensive crackdown on Jewish culture in the late 1940s, however, these activists fled Eastern Europe. Later, it was rumored that the remnants of the YIVO collections left behind had been destroyed by the authorities.While the materials recovered by YIVO in Germany represented only a fraction of its prewar archives and library, they served as the basis for rebuilding YIVO in the United States. The Institute continued to collect books, journals, documents, photographs, films, and other artifacts. By the late 1980s, the YIVO library held about 320,000 books and periodicals, and the Archives estimated its holdings at 22 million items. Today, YIVO remains the foremost collection of materials related to East European Jewish history and culture and Yiddish language and literature. The Library and Archives also have important collections related to the Holocaust and American Jewish history. Even during the war, YIVO in New York had managed to carry on as much of its prewar scholarly endeavors as possible. YIVO began publishing Yidishe shprakh (Yiddish Language), a Yiddish linguistics journal in 1941, and in 1944 mounted an exhibition, Pictures of Jewish Life in Prewar Poland, the first public show of photographer Roman Vishniac's work. Over the next few decades, YIVO continued to publish important scholarly works. It revived YIVO-bleter, its Yiddish-language scholarly journal, and began to issue the English-language YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science. In 1949, it published Uriel Weinreich's College Yiddish, a textbook that is still in use in many university-level Yiddish courses. Publication of additional resources for the study of Yiddish followed. (Click here for YIVO's list of available publications.) YIVO held yearly scholarly conferences. Hundreds of students passed through its intensive summer Yiddish program, the Uriel Weinreich Program in Yiddish, Language, Literature and Culture, and the graduate seminars of its Max Weinreich Center for Advanced Jewish Studies. In keeping with Vilna YIVO's original mission to serve as a cultural resource for the Jewish people, New York YIVO initiated many public programs, some of which were aimed at non-scholarly audiences. It mounted exhibitions, co-sponsored the First New York Yiddish Film Festival in 1977, produced a documentary film, Image Before My Eyes, in 1981, and inaugurated a Yiddish folk arts program with workshops in Yiddish music, dance, and folk art in 1985. In 1989, YIVO received dramatic news—some of the archival materials long thought destroyed by the Nazis and Soviets had been hidden by idealistic librarians in a back room of the Lithuanian National Book Chamber.
In 1999, YIVO moved into its fifth American home, the Center for Jewish History, at 15 West 16th Street in New York City. The year 2000 marked not only the grand opening of the Center, but also YIVO's 75th anniversary. Now, in the new millennium, YIVO looks to both the past and the future for inspiration in carrying out its mission of preserving and fostering the study of East European Jewish history and culture. As historian and YIVO founder Simon Dubnow urged at the turn of the 19th century, "I appeal to all educated readers...to the old and the young...come join the camp of the builders of history!"Become a builder of history and a part of YIVO's history by becoming a member of YIVO today!
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