Introduction

Archives

Overview How to Receive Permission to Reproduce Materials from the Film Archive Links to Other Film Archives with Jewish Materials

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Overview

A high proportion of the films in YIVO's small Film Archive are unique or rare items. The mostly 16mm and 8mm films in the collection tend to fall into two genres: amateur (home movies) and industrial (community relations films made by Jewish aid organizations). The Film Archives also contains videotapes, most of which are viewing copies of its films.

The most frequently consulted materials in the Film Archives are the approximately 75 home movies made by American Jews during trips to Eastern Europe in the 1920s-30s. The films depict over 25 shtetlakh and smaller towns (mostly in Poland and Lithuania), as well as major Jewish population centers such as Warsaw, Lodz, Cracow, and Vilna. These amateur films constitute rare motion picture records of Jewish life in Eastern Europe.

The Film Archive also includes two professionally shot films of prewar Jewish Poland that were commissioned by landsmanshaftn (immigrant mutual aid societies): A Pictorial Review of Kolbuszowa (1929) and an untitled film about Szediszow (1935).

The other large body of films in the YIVO Film Archive are movies made in the 1940s-1960s by Jewish social welfare agencies such as HIAS, the United Service for New Americans, and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Most of these films document the situation of Jewish refugees in Europe, the United States, and Palestine/Israel and the organizational work carried out on their behalf.

Unique films in the collection include:

• 8mm footage of the Warsaw and Cracow ghettos during World War II, including a fragment of footage shot during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943.

• Two short amateur films about Jewish refugees in Shanghai, China in the late 1940s.

• A Yiddish-language newsreel of a memorial ceremony for Holocaust victims held in Skierniewice, Poland in 1947.

• A Scientific Expedition to Birobidzhan, a 1929 silent film made by a delegation from Brigham Young University in Utah.

• Amateur films made in the 1920s-30s by Abraham Twersky of the Sholem Aleichem Houses in the Bronx which include images of several notable Yiddish cultural figures.

• An amateur film compilation by Moisey Ghitzis of short, silent clips of a number of Yiddish writers and cultural figures in the U.S. in the 1940s-50s.

How to Receive Permission to Reproduce Materials from the Film Archive

YIVO permits the reproduction of materials from its collections on a case-by-case basis, depending on the condition and legal status of the items. Except in certain instances, YIVO does not own copyright to the material in its collections. The user assumes all responsibility for questions of copyright that may arise in the use of copies of YIVO materials.

Film and videotape duplication orders, as well as requests for permission to reproduce materials for broadcast or publication should be made in written form to:

Film Archives

YIVO Institute for Jewish Research

15 West 16th Street

New York, NY 10011-6301, USA

Fax: (212) 292-1892

Links to Other Archives with Jewish Films

Archive Films
A division of Getty Images, Inc., New York, NY

National Archives—Motion Pictures, Films, and Sound and Video Recordings
Washington, DC

Library of Congress—Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division
Washington, DC

National Center for Jewish Film
Waltham, MA

Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archives
Jerusalem, Israel

Footage.net
Online film research search engine.

CAPTION FOR IMAGE AT TOP OF PAGE:
Market day in a shtetl in southeastern Poland. Still from A Pictorial Review of Kolbuszowa, a silent film commissioned by a landsmanshaft in 1929.