In 1925, prominent European intellectuals from the Jewish community, including Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein, helped establish the Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut (YIVO) in Berlin and Wilno in Poland (now Poland). His task was to gather empirical data on modern Jewish life.
There was a specific reason for this.
“The Talmud has been studied since the Middle Ages. The Kabbalah of the Torah,” Jonathan Brent, CEO and executive director of the New York-based YIVO Jewish Research Institute, told DW. “But few knew anything about the real daily process for almost a thousand years in which the Jews survived, reached the world, cared for their children. What were their real traditions? What were their songs? “What were their relations with their neighbors and their non-Jewish neighbors?”
A work of self-discovery
In the same year that YIVO was founded, Max Weinreich, the then head of YIVO The Wilno branch in Poland (also known as Vilna, now Vilnius, Lithuania) sent “zamlers” – Gidis for “collectors” – around the world to gather information and material from Jewish communities.
He also published advertisements asking people to send posters, letters, political statements and books as material for the study of modern Jewish life. YIVO CEO Jonathan Brent explained that Weinreich’s call “blew up the Jewish imagination.”
“They were excited about this idea. It’s not like they discovered the artifacts of the Holy Roman Empire or something that happened in 1492. It was self-discovery … The idea of the YIVO Institute was that this process of self-discovery would equip people to “Enter the modern world and build a modern Jewish identity.”
In the years that followed, YIVO became “the world’s largest collection of material on Eastern European Jewish life,” according to its website.
Nazi occupation
However, the success of YIVO was short-lived. The Nazis had occupied Poland in 1939 and entered Vilnius in 1941. Nazi troops, under Alfred Rosenberg, an NSDAP ideologue and minister of the Third Reich for the occupied territories, occupied the YIVO collections. The idea was to destroy some of the material and send it to Frankfurt to serve as food for anti-Semitic ideology developed by the Institut zur Erforschung der Judenfrage (in German).
Because the Nazis were unfamiliar with Jewish culture and local languages, they needed people to classify YIVO’s extensive collections. So they hired some 32 forced laborers — mostly Jewish intellectuals, including Yiddish poets Shmerke Kaczerginski and Avrom Sutzkever, and former YIVO co-director Zelig Kalmanovitch — to search the archives.
Pouring out the loot
When the Nazis occupied Vilnius, they forced the Jews into ghettos and intellectual Jewish slave laborers entered the YIVO building with ropes for sorting. At one point, the members of the group decided that they did not want to give everything to the Nazis. Many doubts circulated in their minds: “They could be bombed by the allies. What would happen if the Nazis burned everything at the end of the war?” So the team decided to hide the documents in the ghettos, Brent explained.
“And in an incredible effort, they hid books and papers and all sorts of things on their bodies under their clothes, pants and shoes. They left the YIVO building with this material and went into the ghetto with it. Any of them. “If he had been found to have done that, he would have been severely punished if he had not been shot immediately on the spot,” he said.
The group managed to obtain hundreds of thousands of pages of material and books, and these materials were then hidden underground in a ghetto, and a considerable amount was also given to their non-Jewish friends, namely the Lithuanians and Poles.
After the war
By 1945, much of the material sent to Frankfurt by the Nazis had been recovered by an American organization called Monuments Men and sent to New York, where YIVO’s Max Weinreich had taken refuge and formed a new base for the organization. In Vilnius, the documents were unearthed after the end of World War II in 1945.
“Sutzkever and Kaczerginski had the idea to build a new Jewish museum in Vilnius,” explains Brent, adding that by then Vilnius had become the capital of Lithuania, which was under Soviet occupation. But soon enough, the Soviets launched their own campaign against the Jews.
This time, there were no Jewish intellectuals left to save the documents. Instead, it was the Lithuanian librarian, Antanas Ulpis, who kept the materials in the corners and corners of the church of St. George and the Carmelite monastery in the Lithuanian capital.
The documents were finally discovered after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
1.5 million online exhibits
Jonathan Brent became CEO of the YIVO Institute in New York in 2009. When he visited Lithuania that year, the documents were stored, he says, “in dark, unventilated rooms.” No one saw or read these materials, which were constantly getting worse.
As a result, in 2014, Brent and colleagues launched the Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Online Collections project to digitize documents, with the added goal of substantially reuniting YIVO collections from Lithuania and New York. About $ 7 million (€ 6.2 million) and seven years later, this collection is now online.
Today, YIVO’s pre-war archive contains over 40,000 rare and unique books and magazines, as well as over 1.5 million documents collected by Jews in Eastern Europe.
This includes the “Autobiography of Beba Epstein”, written in the school year 1933-1934 by Beba Epstein, then 11 or 12 years old. Her book, which can be found on the YIVO Museum website, is described as providing “a glimpse into the life of a young, young girl and a glimpse into the lives of Jewish children in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust.”
Another notable example is the diary of Theodor Herzl, who convened the first Zionist Congress in the Kingdom of Switzerland in 1897, following the publication of his book “The Jewish State” in 1896. He is one of the founders of the political form of Zionism. which was the movement for the establishment of a Jewish homeland.
“It’s the largest collection of pre-war material on Jewish life: folklore, music, poetry, plays, political organizations, social organizations, cooking, medical records, the organization of school systems,” Brent explained.
The material aims to give its viewers an understanding of how Jewish society was organized – and not without humor from the past. For example, a 1927 Yiddish hiking manual offers the following advice to its young readers: “Backpacks need to be hung. It has happened before even a backpack can be lost and found again in a cow’s mouth!”
Edward Blank YIVO Vilna online collections are available here.
Edited by: Brenda Haas
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