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The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe has been planned as the definitive reference work on all aspects of the history and culture of Jews in Eastern Europe from the beginnings of their settlement in the region to the present time. This multi-volume encyclopedia, comprising approximately 2 million words, over 1,000 images, and more than 100 maps, will draw on the most current scholarship in all relevant fields and will explore Jewish life in all its variety and complexity. The goal is to cover everything of cultural or historical significance using an ecumenical, nondenominational, and nonideological editorial approach. This project is unprecedented. To this day, a full-fledged encyclopedia dedicated exclusively to the centuries-long history and culture of East European Jewry has not been developed.
Editor in Chief Gershon David Hundert, professor of history and chair of the Department of Jewish Studies at McGill University, has assembled an internationally recognized group of scholars to serve as editors and contributors. The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe not only will provide a forum for their collective knowledge, but also serves as a meeting point for a new generation of scholars from former Communist Europe and their colleagues from North America, Israel, and Western Europe. The encyclopedia brings their scholarship together for the first time.
The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe is also envisioned as a multimedia project, with an electronic edition published along with the print version. The website will serve as a portal into the study of East European Jewry by placing educational, archival and reference resources at the fingertips of users worldwide. Indeed, the integration of a basic reference work with public access to a major archival and library collection makes the YIVO Encyclopedia Online perhaps the only project of this kind currently in development.
When published in 2008, the print and electronic versions of the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe will offer a much needed revision of the East European Jewish experience, with up-to-date scholarship, diversity of contributors, and attention to previously overlooked aspects of history and culture.
WHY AN ENCYCLOPEDIA ON JEWS IN EASTERN EUROPE?
Of the more than 13 million Jews worldwide (including over 6 million in the U.S., 5 million in Israel and more than 650,000 in Eastern Europe), many seek information about their origins and the lives of their ancestors, but surprisingly, no publication has ever attempted to systematically represent the entire historical legacy of this culture until now.
The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe will also provide an authoritative reference for scholars in such fields as Jewish Studies, East European Studies, and Slavic Studies. The volumes will provide East Europeans with a much-needed resource for studying aspects of their national histories that were neglected and even suppressed for decades under the Soviet system.
For the purposes of this encyclopedia, the geographical parameters are the regions east of Germany, north of the Balkans, and west of the Ural Mountains—borders corresponding roughly to today's Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, and the Baltic States. Entries will cover events, people, places, and related topics from the earliest Jewish settlements in this region to 2000.
Furthermore, as the study of the Holocaust becomes more established in American and European high schools and universities, and Holocaust museums attendance increases worldwide, there is a growing recognition within the field that the Holocaust needs to be placed within a broader framework of knowledge about the people and culture destroyed by the Nazis. The YIVO Encyclopedia will offer the general public a high quality comprehensive resource for learning about pre-war Jewish life.
THE YIVO INSTITUTE FOR JEWISH RESEARCH
The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe is a new expression of the preeminent role that YIVO has played in Jewish scholarship and communal life for over 75 years. Founded in Berlin in 1925 and headquartered in Wilno [Vilnius], Poland, YIVO set out to bring modern culture to all sectors of the Jewish community. This mission was to be accomplished by studying Jewish society through the prism of the modern social sciences: sociology, folklore, linguistics, psychology, history, and economics.
In 1940, concurrent with the destruction of the European Jewish community, YIVO director Max Weinreich (who had escaped from Europe) formally reestablished the organization in New York City, where a branch of YIVO had existed since 1925. After the war, portions of YIVO's library and archives were discovered in Germany, and in 1947 the U.S. Army shipped the recovered materials to New York. These remnants of YIVO's prewar holdings served as the basis for rebuilding the institute's collections in the United States.
YIVO is the only pre-Holocaust scholarly institution to have transferred its mission to the United States. From its base in New York City it continues to serve as the foremost center for the study of East European Jewry and Yiddish language, literature, and folklore. It also has established itself as one of the world's leading resources for the study of the American Jewish immigrant experience.
The institute continues to publish scholarly journals and monographs; to mount public programs such as exhibitions, lectures, and film series; and to educate and train through seminars and Yiddish language courses. Every year, over 3,000 scholars, students, curators, writers, filmmakers, artists, performers, historians, and family history researchers visit the YIVO Library and Archives—the world's largest collection of Yiddish books, documents, and other artifacts related to the history of East European Jewry. YIVO's staff fields an additional 9,000 research inquires per year via letters, email, and telephone.
PROJECT STAFF
The encyclopedia's editor in chief, Gershon David Hundert, is the Leanor Segal Chair in Jewish Studies at McGill University in Montreal. Dr. Hundert is one of the foremost historians of Polish Jewry in the world. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University and is the author of Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century: A Genealogy of Modernity (University of California Press, 2004), The Jews in a Polish Private Town: The Case of Opatow in the Eighteenth Century (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), and The Jews in Poland and Russia: Bibliographical Essays (Indiana University Press, 1984). He will be supported by an editorial board of thirty scholars from all over the world who are recognized experts in various aspects of Eastern European Jewish history, religion, and culture (list of experts available upon request).
Based at the YIVO Institute's offices in New York, project director Jeffrey Edelstein has more than ten years' experience in editorial and production work on multi-volume encyclopedias, principally at Oxford University Press, where he was managing editor of the Scholarly and Professional Reference Department. Mr. Edelstein supervises all aspects of project administration and editorial review, establishes copyeditorial style and reviews edited manuscripts, develops the illustrations and cartographic programs, and serves as the principal liaison between YIVO and the encyclopedia's publisher. He is currently aided by an editorial assistant and a copy chief, and on a freelance basis, a bibliographic researcher, additional copyeditors, and an illustrations editor.
BUDGET AND FUNDING
The total project budget from inception at the end of 2001 until anticipated publication in 2008 is approximately $3.3 million. To date, funding received totals $1.7 million, principally in grants from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, the Charles H. Revson Foundation, the Righteous Persons Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Members of YIVO's Board of Directors and other private donors have also made personal financial commitments to the project.
To make a donation to support the creation of the Encyclopedia, please call Deborah Stundel, Development Executive Assistant, at (212) 294-6140 or donate online.
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