Program on Yiddish Treasures Rescued from the Nazis at Ezra-Habonim, the Niles Township Jewish Congregation
When: Sunday, March 11, 2018 | 3:00pm
Where: Ezra-Habonim, the Niles Township Jewish Congregation, 4500 Dempster, Skokie
(Skokie, IL) – Letters written by Sholem Aleichem. A postcard hand-written by Marc Chagall. Five notebooks of Yiddish poetry. Yiddish theater scripts including one of “Sherlock Holmes.” Fragments of an 1877 manuscript of the first Yiddish “best-seller.” These and many more treasures will be part of a lecture and presentation of significant artifacts rescued from the Nazis, Sunday, March 11, 3:00pm, at Ezra-Habonim, the Niles Township Jewish Congregation, 4500 Dempster, Skokie.
The program Rare Works and the Reclamation of the Cultural History of European Jews, will be presented by historian Jonathan Brent, Executive Director and CEO of YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.
The presentation is free and open to the public.
This important collection of papers, letters and manuscripts was found recently in the basement of a church in Vilnius, Lithuania, as part of the continuing work of The Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Collections Project, begun in 2014, is a seven-year, $5.6 million project to preserve and digitize approximately 1.1 million pages of materials and some 12,000 books that were rescued from the Holocaust. The recent discovery of more than 170,000 pages of documents in Vilnius is the newest and most exciting part of this Project.
“This is the second time important cultural artifacts were found in this same church,” says Rabbi Ralph Ruebner, chairman of the program. “In 1991, a large part of the YIVO Institute’s pre-WW II collection, which had been hidden from the Nazis, was discovered. The new discovery of 170,000 pages of materials was made in May, 2017. These precious materials, long thought to have been lost forever, had been stored in a separate room in The Church of St. George in Vilnius, Lithuania, the birthplace of YIVO.”
YIVO was founded in Vilna, Poland, now Vilnius, Lithuania, in 1925. During the Nazi occupation of 1940-1944, the Nazis destroyed most Jewish cultural artifacts. “90% of the Jews in Lithuania were murdered by the Nazis during World War II,” Ruebner adds. However, recognizing the unique value of the YIVO collections, the Nazis decided to transport a segment of them to Germany for use after the war in the so-called Institute for the Study of The Jews in Frankfurt. In addition to these materials (which were found by the U.S. army after the War and sent to YIVO in New York), YIVO leaders hid a significant amount of other documents and artifacts in the Vilna Ghetto and elsewhere. A portion of these materials were dug up or otherwise recovered after the War and stayed in Lithuania where in 1948 the Soviets sought to destroy them a second time. The items which have been found “are gold,” according to David Fishman, professor of Jewish history at the Jewish Theological Seminary. “It will take decades for scholars to analyze all of this.”
At this time, Antanas Ulpis, the head of the Lithuanian Book Chamber as it was called, retrieved and hid these Jewish materials in secret rooms of The Church of St George in Vilnius, which the Soviets had converted into the so-called “Book Chamber.” Ulpis was not Jewish and did not speak or read either Hebrew or Yiddish. He risked his life and the lives of his family in doing so.
“Ezra-Habonim, the Niles Township Jewish Congregation is the perfect spot for this important lecture,” says Rabbi Jeffrey Weill, spiritual leader of the synagogue. “Both Ezra and Habonim were founded in the late 1930s by European Jews who fled the Nazis. Many Holocaust survivors joined the synagogue when they came to Chicago after World War II. It was and still is a place of comfort and companionship.”
The materials found in Lithuania in the course of the Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Collections Project were originally part YIVO’s pre-War archive and library. Though these documents and books will remain in Lithuania as part of the Lithuanian National Library’s Judaica Center, the YIVO Project will digitize them and digitally reunite them with the materials that today are in New York. The combined collection of over 1.1 million pages of letters, literary manuscripts, memoirs, diaries, sermons, theatrical materials, communal record books, administrative records and treatises of many sorts from all over the Jewish world represents the single largest collection of pre-War Jewish materials extant anywhere in the world. It is a great, unique treasure that will enable scholars and the general public to understand the culture and life of the Jewish people of Eastern Europe before The Holocaust.
For further information about the program, please call Ezra-Habonim, the Niles Township Jewish Congregation at (847) 675-4141 or go to www.ehnt.org. You can also email Irma Friedman, YIVO's Director of Development, at ipfriedman@yivo.cjh.org.
About YIVO
The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research is dedicated to the preservation and study of the history and culture of East European Jewry worldwide. For nearly a century, YIVO has pioneered new forms of Jewish scholarship, research, education, and cultural expression. Our public programs and exhibitions, as well as online and on-site courses, extend our outreach to a global community. The YIVO Archives contains 24 million unique items and YIVO’s Library has over 400,000 volumes—the single largest resource for the study of East European Jewish life in the world. yivo.org / yivo.org/the-whole-story