Introduction

Archives

Library

Yiddish Dictionaries Holocaust Survivor Lists Yizkor Books New Acquisitions

Jewish Genealogy Resources

Resources for Studying the Holocaust

Preservation of Rare Books & Documents

Services Price List

Major Collections Vilna Collection Holocaust Collections Elias Tcherikower Collection Yiddish Collections Bund Archives & Library of the Jewish Labor Movement William Milwitzky Ladino Collection

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YIVO Library Catalog Now Available Online

The YIVO Library is pleased to present the first phase of its online catalogue. This first edition includes 60,000 database records, mostly for monographic books, in all European languages, as well as in transliterated ("Romanized") Yiddish and Hebrew.

Please note that the online catalog represents only a portion of our extensive holdings and is very much a work in progress! (Please continue to consult the card catalog in the Reading Room at the Center for Jewish History for the major portion of the library's holdings.)

Computerization of the YIVO Library Catalog was made possible by the very generous support of

The Michael Baker Family Foundation

The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, Inc.

Mr. and Mrs. Sol Neil Corbin

Mr. and Mrs. Irwin Jacobs

The Waber Fund

Major Collections

Vilna Collection

The Vilna Collection is the core collection of the YIVO Library. It is the surviving remnant of YIVO's prewar library in Vilna and also contains many books from the world-famous Strashun Library. Both institutions were looted by the Nazis during World War II. After the war, YIVO was able to recover some of its library materials with the help of the U.S. Army, and also received books from the Strashun Library. (The other surviving Strashun Library books were transferred to the library of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.)

The Vilna Collection consists of about 50,000 books and periodicals in Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian, German, Polish, and other languages and is divided into subcollections:

• Rabbinica
  (25,000 volumes)
  These books, most of which belonged to the Strashun Library before World War II, form the backbone of the Vilna Collection as a whole. Included in this virtually intact pre-1939 European collection are many titles that are extremely rare. The oldest books in the collection date to the early 16th century. The rabbinica were cataloged during the 1960s by the late Rabbi Hayim Liberman, librarian to the Lubavitcher Rebbe.

• Secular Hebrew works
  (8,000 volumes)
  These fall into two main categories: (a) 18th- and 19th-century books with a non-Orthodox orientation (e.g., commentaries by prominent maskilim), and (b) 20th-century belles-lettres, textbooks, political tracts, and general nonfiction, as a by-product of the modern revival of the Hebrew language. Most were previously part of the Strashun Library. This collection is currently being cataloged.

• Secular Yiddish works
  (5,000 volumes)
  This is a representative collection of modern Yiddish publications, including many titles that are unique to the YIVO Library. Most were previously part of the Strashun Library. The collection was cataloged during the late 1970s and early 1980s, with the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and much of it was subsequently microfilmed, under grants from the S. H. and Helen R. Scheuer Family Foundation and the New York State Library.

• Press
  (3,000 titles)
  Among these are hard-to-find small-town newspapers in Yiddish and one of the most comprehensive sets of Russian-language Jewish periodicals. A wide range of languages is represented among the press materials, most of which were collected by the Vilna YIVO. The Vilna Collection's European Yiddish press holdings were microfilmed during the 1960s, under the sponsorship of the Ab. Cahan Fund.

• Works in other languages
  (1,000 volumes)
  This uncataloged collection is especially strong in rare Polish- and Russian-language Judaica. A portion of the Russian-language materials may be obtained on microfilm from IDC Publishers, The Netherlands.

Holocaust Collections

The YIVO Library is especially strong in resources for studying the Holocaust. When the President's Commission on the Holocaust (the precursor to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum) was first appointed in 1979, the "Bible of the Holocaust period" used in the swearing-in ceremony was a Hebrew Bible from the YIVO Library's Vilna Collection. (The Bible, printed in London in 1861 and bequeathed by its owner, Yehuda Behak of Odessa, to the Great Synagogue of Vilna, was later donated to the Strashun Library. When this library was looted by the Nazis during World War II, the Bible was confiscated for use in a proposed "Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question." It was among the items recovered by YIVO after the war.)

Important components of the library's Holocaust collections include:

• Nazi Collection
  (6,000 volumes)
  These books and periodicals (many of which are quite rare) deal with a wide range of political topics (including anti-Semitica). They were published in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945 and acquired by YIVO after World War II. The collection includes pamphlets by Nazi "specialists" on "the Jewish question," including Johannes Pohl, the chief of the task force that supervised the looting of Jewish cultural treasures in the Vilna region. The collection was used by Max Weinreich in the preparation of Hitler's Professors: The Part of Scholarship in Germany's Crimes Against the Jewish People (YIVO, 1946; 2nd edition, Yale University Press, 1999), his study of the complicity of German academics in the Nazis' genocidal program. (Weinreich's book was later entered into evidence at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials.)

• Displaced Persons Press
  (150 titles)
  Immediately after World War II, Jewish survivors of the Holocaust regrouped in displaced persons (DP) camps in Germany, Austria and Italy, where they sought to resume a more normal life. In these camps, the survivors almost immediately began publishing newspapers, broadsides, and journals. These periodicals contain a wealth of documentation on the extermination of European Jewry and on the reconstitution of Jewish life after the war. The Bibliography of Articles on the Catastrophe and Heroism in Yiddish Periodicals, by Joseph Gar—co-published in 1966 by YIVO and Yad Vashem (Jerusalem) as volume 9 of their "Joint Documentary Projects, Bibliographical Series" on the Holocaust—is largely based on the periodicals in this collection. The Displaced Persons Press collection was first microfilmed during the 1960s as part of the Ab. Cahan Fund Microfilming Project. In 1990, the microfilms were published, along with a printed guide, by YIVO and University Publications of America (Bethesda, MD).

• Memorial Books
  (650 volumes)
  During the decades after World War II, landsmanshaftn (Jewish immigrant mutual aid societies) in the U.S., Israel, and elsewhere published approximately 700 memorial volumes (yizker-bikher) commemorating their former home towns in Eastern Europe. These memoir compilations represent the most extensive—and for some communities, the only—published record of Jewish life in cities and towns throughout Eastern Europe. YIVO's collection of yizker-bikher is the most extensive in the United States.

Elias Tcherikower Collection

Yiddish Collections

Bund Archives & Library of the Jewish Labor Movement

William Milwitzky Ladino Collection

CAPTION FOR IMAGE AT TOP OF PAGE:
Cover of Af eyn fisele (On one little footie) by N. Lurye, published in Kiev, USSR, 1922. Cover design by T. Tshaykov. (YIVO Library)