The Project
One of the most ambitious preservation and digital initiatives in Jewish history, the Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Online Collections project:
- Preserved the historical record of Jewish civilization in Eastern Europe for future generations.
- Made YIVO’s unique original prewar collections available worldwide for the first time.
- Reunited the single largest digital collection of materials related to East European Jewish civilization and the largest collection of Yiddish-language materials in the world.
- Has stimulated research and scholarship on East European Jewish studies and the Holocaust.
- Is providing a unique and invaluable resource and tool for general, Jewish, and Holocaust education.
- Offers a key resource for Europeans who seek to explore and understand their own countries’ multicultural histories.
- Informs and transforms Jewish historiography on East European Jewish civilization.
The YIVO Vilna Collections in New York and the rediscovered books and documents in Lithuania are now fully preserved, cataloged, and digitized. These collections have been made available to general audiences and scholars around the world on this website.
The project officially began in Spring 2015 and was completed in January 2022. In May 2017, some 170,000 pages of previously unknown documents, lost to history for almost 70 years, were discovered in Vilnius, significantly expanding the scope of our project.