Featured Vilna Collection Artifacts

An early 19th-century Yiddish book of jokes.

A humorous 1921 clipping from the Forverts sheds light on Jewish immigrant culture in Belgium.

Every book in the Strashun Collection is a unique artifact.

A Jewish organization founded in 1863 sought to teach Jewish children Russian and inculcate them with high culture.

Tkhines, Yiddish private devotions and prayers, were intended primarily for women and often written by women.

Fragments of the records of the Nazi agency charged with looting Jewish cultural treasures can be found among YIVO’s recovered collections in Vilnius.

A German-Hebrew bible becomes a tool in the hands of maskilim, reformist activists of the Haskalah.

An intriguing artifact reveals how much we still don’t know about the past.

A Haggadah from 1830 is familiar in more ways than one.

YIVO’s archives contain the last traces of the lost world of Polish Jewish children.