The Weinreich Center offers graduate level seminars and fellowships in the fields of Yiddish language and literature and Jewish history, ethnography, and folklore. It sponsors public lectures and scholarly conferences and oversees the publication of journals and books.

• Project Judaica: A joint project of YIVO, the Jewish Theological Seminary, and the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow, Project Judaica is a five-year program which trains students in Russia as specialists in Jewish Studies.

• Uriel Weinreich Program in Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture: This intensive summer language course, co-sponsored by YIVO and Columbia University since 1968, is regarded as the most comprehensive program available in the academic study of Yiddish.

• Routes to Roots Foundation: This organization and YIVO have formed a partnership to produce a series of guides to Jewish records in the Polish, Moldovan, and Ukrainian national archives. These guides are of special interest to family history researchers. (More information on these publications and how to order them can be obtained from the Routes to Roots Foundation web site.)

  

  Project Judaica

  Eastern Europe's rich resources for the study of Jewish history and culture were by and large inaccessible throughout most of the Soviet era. Most collections of Jewish books, documents, and other artifacts in Russia and Ukraine languished, uncataloged and off-limits to scholars. There were tantalizing hints that important collections had survived the cataclysms of the twentieth century, but their contents and physical condition could only be guessed at.

  Over the decades, the study of Jewish history and culture had been increasingly repressed in the USSR. By the time Communism fell, there were very few scholars, archivists, or librarians in Russia and Ukraine with the knowledge to study, catalog, and care for these collections. There were few academics or librarians proficient in Yiddish or Hebrew, the language of many of the books and documents in the archives.

  In 1991, YIVO and the Jewish Theological Seminary(JTS), seeing the opportunity to make a unique contribution to the effort to rescue Jewish archival collections and resuscitate Jewish Studies in the former USSR, founded Project Judaica.

  In cooperation with the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow (RSUH), Project Judaica trains students as specialists in Jewish Studies. The five-year program stresses either Bible and rabbinics (JTS track) or Yiddish and East European Jewish history (YIVO track). Some students in the program also earn credits by working as interns in the YIVO Archives in New York. To date, 36 students have graduated from the program. Graduates have gone on to pursue doctoral studies and advanced research in Jewish studies and/or to jobs in Jewish education and communal service. Project Judaica is directed by Dr. David E. Fishman, a member of the faculty of JTS.

  Project Judaica also includes a Jewish Archival Survey, directed by Marek Web, YIVO Senior Research Scholar, formerly Chief Archivist. The goal of the project is to prepare comprehensive guides to Jewish archival records throughout the former USSR. A guide to the Moscow archives was issued in 1997, and a Belarus guide will be issued in 2000. The guides enable researchers throughout the world to locate materials on topics of interest to them in the former USSR.

  
  

  

  Research Projects at YIVO

  YIVO continues to sponsor research projects that make use of its archives and library. Annual fellowships provide funding for scholars to study YIVO's collections. At the conclusion of their fellowships, these scholars deliver public lectures on the topics of their research and are sometimes invited to publish their work through YIVO, either in a scholarly journal or as a monograph. (Click here for a list of currently available YIVO publications.)

  Other research projects are supported by grants from foundations and private funders. Current and forthcoming YIVO research projects include:

  • The publication of an English-language anthology of American Jewish immigrant autobiographies, based on the 233 entries in a 1942 YIVO contest for the best autobiography by a Jewish immigrant to America (including Canada, Argentina, Mexico, and Cuba). The project, funded by a grant from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, is directed by Professor Daniel Soyer of Fordham University.

  • The publication of The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, to be edited by Dr. Gershon Hundert, Montreal Jewish Community Professor of Jewish Studies, McGill University (Forthcoming, 2008).

  • The publication of Awakening Lives: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland before the Holocaust, an anthology of Polish-Jewish youth autobiographies, based on entries to a YIVO contest in the late 1930s. The editor of the volume is Dr. Jeffrey Shandler, Assistant Professor of Yiddish Literature and Culture at Rutgers University (Yale University Press, September 2002).

  • The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from Vilna Ghetto and Camps 1939-1944, a new English translation of wartime diary of Herman Kruk, a communal leader in the Vilna Ghetto (Yale University Press, 2002). The editors and translators are Dr. Benjamin Harshav, Jacob and Hilda Blaustein Professor of Hebrew Literature and Language at Yale University, and Barbara Harshav.

  
  

  CAPTION FOR IMAGE AT TOP OF PAGE:
  A lecture by historian Jacob Shatzky at YIVO, New York, 1945. (Records of YIVO—New York)