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Overview
An associate of the Research Libraries Group (RLG), the YIVO Library contains over 385,000 volumes. The YIVO Archives holds over 24,000,000 documents, photographs, recordings, posters, films, videotapes, and other artifacts. Together, they comprise the world's largest collection of materials related to the history and culture of East European Jewry and the American Jewish immigrant experience.
YIVO has the world's foremost collection of books and documents written in Yiddish. The Archives and Library collections also hold many works in twelve major languages, including English, French, German, Hebrew, Ladino, Polish, and Russian.
Among the many visitors to the Archives and Library are scholars, students, amateur genealogists, museum curators, writers, filmmakers, artists, performers, historians, and family history researchers. The YIVO staff fields research queries from around the world, by telephone, fax, letters, and email.
The collections of the Archives and Library provide especially rich resources for study in the following five subject areas:
- The history and culture of East European Jewry before World War II (including significant collections related to Yiddish language, literature, and music)
- American Jewish history, with a focus on immigration and acculturation
- The Holocaust
- European history
- Jewish genealogy
Highlights of the collections include:
East European Jewry Before World War II
- The Vilna Collection of 40,000 volumes, including 25,000 rabbinical works dating from as early as the 16th century
- Original communal registers and documents from Poland, Russia, Lithuania, and Germany, from the 17th century onwards
- The Bund Archives and Library, documenting the Jewish labor movement from the late 19th century onwards
- Rabbinical manuscripts
- The world's largest collection of sound recordings, photographs, and film related to East European Jewish culture
- A prominent collection of Yiddish children's literature
- An extensive collection of Yiddish theater posters and scripts
Holocaust
(See also separate page on Holocaust Study Resources.)
- Anti-Semitic literature published in Germany between 1920 and 1945, including the Nazi Collection of some 6,000 volumes published in the Third Reich from 1933-1945
- Original documents from the Warsaw, Lodz, and Vilna Ghettos
- Thousands of handwritten eyewitness accounts by Holocaust survivors, collected from 1945 to the present
- Newspapers and periodicals created by Jewish refugees in displaced persons (DP) camps in Germany, Austria, and Italy
- Over 750 memorial books (yizker-bikher) commemorating Jewish communities in Poland and neighboring countries
- Lists of survivors and victims of the Holocaust
American Jewish History
- Records of the Educational Alliance, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), and other relief and rescue organizations
- Records of several hundred landsmanshaftn (immigrant mutual aid societies)
- Over 200 autobiographies of Jewish immigrants collected by YIVO in 1942
- The world's most extensive Yiddish music and theater collection
- The private papers of hundreds of American Jewish writers, actors, playwrights, composers, historians, and communal leaders