The Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Online Collections
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YIVO's Highlights of the Decade

Jan 19, 2020

Thanks to our incredible donors, YIVO has been able to accomplish many great things over the past decade. Here are some of our favorites:

Online Resources

Using the latest technology at our disposal, we are working to make our precious history and the lessons contained in it available for free to an international audience. As part of this commitment, we have launched several websites to help individuals and scholars alike delve into Jewish history and culture. These online resources include:

We have also begun work on the YIVO Bruce and Francesca Cernia Slovin Online Museum. This first-of-its-kind online museum features multilingual resources, galleries of carefully selected and translated materials with commentary by leading scholars, cutting-edge technologies such as augmented and virtual reality, personal stories, historical documents, memoirs, and other special features to showcase the narratives and history of our community for people around the world.

The Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Online Collections

Launched in 2015, the Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Online Collections project is a $7 million, international landmark digital initiative to process, conserve, and digitally reunite YIVO’s divided prewar library and archival collections through a dedicated web portal. These materials include newly-discovered Holocaust documentation and the remnants of the famed Strashun Library. This project is a partnership between the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, the Lithuanian Central State Archives, the Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania, and the Wroblewski Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences. It has inspired funders, scholars, and laypeople around the world.

An astounding 1.3 million original documents and 12,500 rare books are being preserved, digitized, and virtually reunited to recreate YIVO’s prewar library and archival collections through a dedicated website, to make it accessible to the broader community. 100% of books have been digitized, with nearly 40% available online. Nearly 50% of archival documents have digitized of the project’s estimated 2 million pages, and nearly 50% of images of books and documents are available online of the project’s estimated 4.1 million images.

This past year, we launched a new edition of the Vilna Collections search portal at vilnacollections.yivo.org, which featured improved search filtering, advanced search, and search results that include related entries in the YIVO Encyclopedia.

Education Initiatives

To mobilize the next generation of teachers, scholars, and students of the Yiddish language and Eastern European Jewish history and culture, YIVO hosts educational programming throughout the year. Many young scholars who studied at YIVO have become leaders in the field of Jewish studies across the world. Our educational programming teaches our students to draw from the vast cultural inheritance, engaging deeply with the Yiddish language, the history of Eastern European Jewry, and the ever-changing landscape of Jewish cultural life.

YIVO launched its first online course, Discovering Ashkenaz: Jewish Life in Eastern Europe, to rave reviews in January 2016. Since then, we have launched two more courses, Folksong, Demons, and the Evil Eye: Folklore of Ashkenaz and Oh Mama, I’m in Love! The Story of the Yiddish Stage, presented by Edward Blank & Family. More than 5,200 people from 47 states and 47 countries have signed up to take our online courses.

Our fourth online course, A Seat at the Table: A Journey into Jewish Food is currently in development and will launch on May 1, 2020 with a special program taking place at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, DC. This course is sponsored by The Covenant Foundation, The Shine Trust, and The Edward Blank Family Foundation.

Launched in 2012 and hosted in partnership with Bard College, the Winter Program explores all aspects of Jewish life, with a focus on how Jews have influenced and been influenced by the cultures of the countries in which they have lived. Subjects include literature, theater, music, politics, philosophy, history, and more. The Winter Program has grown steadily over the last decade, with over 150 students attending the 2019 Winter Program, the largest to date.

Students from around the world join the summer program where they train to be future scholars, teachers, and ambassadors of Yiddish language and culture. The longest running Yiddish intensive program in the world, we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the program in 2018 with alumni, teachers, and the YIVO community. The 2019 Summer Program cohort was our largest in more than a decade, with 75 students.

Each spring and fall, YIVO offers Yiddish language, history, and culture courses for students of all levels and backgrounds. Over the past decade, YIVO has taught over 70 courses, and has seen demand for these courses increase in recent years, prompting the addition of new weeklong and intensive courses to the calendar.

Public Programs

From lectures and conferences to theatrical performances and concerts, YIVO’s public programs bring new discoveries and buried treasures to life. Featuring award-winning scholars, writers, and artists, YIVO also commissions new cultural works, inspired by and utilizing YIVO materials. We hosted more than 400 public programs, covering Jewish life, history, and culture.

Our conferences saw record numbers of multi-generational attendees. Notable conferences included:

Our memorable concerts covered a variety of Jewish musical styles and eras. For many of these concerts, new works inspired by YIVO’s archives were commissioned and performed by up and coming composers and musicians. They include:

We hosted staged dramatic readings of Yiddish plays in translation. These plays are from YIVO’s archives and have not been seen in decades:

Writers and researchers come to YIVO both to do research for their book and to celebrate the launches of those books once they are published. Among those book talks hosted by YIVO are:

In addition to recording most of our public programs for later online viewing, YIVO has begun livestreaming several of our public programs, which has garnered thousands of views from across the US and around the world.

Exhibitions

YIVO’s exhibitions showcase our many unique collections, where gallery-goers can see first-hand, rare materials ranging from governmental and rabbinical documents, to manuscripts of famous authors, to art produced by Jewish artists. We have mounted over twenty exhibitions over the last ten years.

Our exciting exhibits include:

Along with our regular exhibitions, YIVO hosts a series of online exhibitions that showcase treasures from our world-renowned archival and library collections and explore East European Jewish history and culture, Yiddish language and literature, American Jewish history, the Holocaust, and many other topics related to the Jewish experience. These exhibitions can be viewed at exhibitions.yivo.org.

With your help, we will continue developing these landmark projects, diverse public programs, and unique educational initiatives.

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