Featured Vilna Collection Artifacts

The Yiddish actor and director Zygmunt Turkow was born and raised in Warsaw, where he got his start on the stage and went on to co-found—in partnership with his wife at the time, actress Ida Kaminska—the influential dramatic troupe “Varshever Yidisher Kunst-Theater” (Warsaw Yiddish Art Theater; circa 1924-1928).

Elias Tcherikower was a founding member of YIVO in Vilna, a member of its Executive Committee, and Chairman of YIVO’s Historical Section from 1925-1940 as well as a historian and political activist.

Two hundred years ago, Jewish women had to struggle for the right to work as teachers (or even to obtain an education), as attested to by these notes for a study on the subject.

What sort of information can be gleaned from an old program brochure from 1921?

A long-lost Passover song focuses on food and flirtation.

The autobiography of Beba Epstein—written when she was a precocious fifth-grader before World War II—is one of the 170,000 pages of materials discovered in 2017.

A 1902 instruction manual for Jewish farmers.

The manuscript of the published memoirs of Yisroel Yekhiel Kopeloff, a Yiddish writer and activist.

A short German typescript by Martin Buber, signed, with handwritten corrections.

A 17th-century book by the chronicler of the Khmel’nytski Uprising, written before he himself became a refugee.