The Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Online Collections
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Press About the Project

Watch the Press Conference (October 24, 2017):

The New York Times, A Trove of Yiddish Artifacts Rescued From the Nazis, and Oblivion (October 18, 2017)

Picked up by by Haaretz in Israel, Mosaic Magazine, Jewish Insider, Bernardinai.lt in Lithuania, The Jewish World, and Blouin Artinfo.

Many of the items, the experts said, offer glimpses into the hardscrabble everyday lives of the Jews of Eastern Europe when the region, not Israel or the Lower East Side, was the center of the Jewish world.

The Associated Press, Papers believed to be lost in Holocaust go on display in US (October 18, 2017)

Picked up by 180+ outlets worldwide including The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, U.S. News, Times of Israel, Boston Herald, and Daily News.

“The troves discovered in Lithuania are the most important body of material in Jewish history and culture to be unearthed in more than half a century, since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.” – David Fishman, professor of Jewish history at The Jewish Theological Seminary

JTA, Thousands of Jewish documents lost during the Holocaust have been discovered (October 24, 2017)

Picked up by Jewish Week, Arutz Sheva in Israel, and Cleveland Jewish News.

“The most valuable treasures of the Jewish people are the traditions, experiences and culture that have shaped our history...So to us, the documents uncovered in this discovery are nothing less than priceless family heirlooms, concealed like precious gems from Nazi storm troopers and Soviet grave robbers.” – Dani Dayan, Israel’s Consul General in New York

The New York Times, Split Up by Holocaust, Top Collection of Yiddish Works will Reunite Digitally (October 2, 2014)

...Over several years Sutzkever, Kaczerginski and others stuffed thousands of books and documents ... inside their clothing and smuggled them into the Nazi-demarcated Jewish ghetto... But they had to rescue them all over again because the Soviets under Stalin, trying to wipe out any ethnic chauvinism, started to destroy the collection.

Haaretz, Yiddish ‘Holocaust surviving’ scripts to reunite online (October 6, 2014)

 Like a survivor, these materials were controlled by the Germans. Like a survivor, they were in hiding. The fact that they were saved is miraculous.

Agence France-Presse, Lithuania’s Lost Jewish Archives Come to Life Online (March 2, 2015)

Picked up by YNetNews, Yahoo! Finance, The Hindu, Jakarta Globe in Indonesia, The Hindu, France24 and 40+ other news outlets in France, The China Post in China, Haveeru in the Maldives, MENAFN in Middle East North Africa, and in a number of other countries.

 After seven decades holed up in a Catholic church basement in the Lithuanian capital, thousands of Yiddish manuscripts that survived the Holocaust and Stalin's anti-Jewish onslaught are finally seeing the light of day.

eJewish Philanthropy, In the Age of Walls, the Bridgebuilder is King: Referendums, Borders and the Work of the Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe (February 21, 2019)

The YIVO Vilnius project straddles the gulf separating the Jerusalem of Lithuania in the 1940s from the New York City of today, uniting them into a seamless, shared digital repository.

Ami Magazine, The Vilna Project: Digitizing the Jewish Treasures of the YIVO Collection (March 25, 2015)

As I lifted each piece, skimmed or read as many as I could, it felt incredible to me that I was seeing these artifacts of my history, actually holding them in my hands.

The Jewish Week, Digitizing the Jewish Past (February 4, 2015)

It will transform the historiography of Eastern European and Russian Jewish history by giving scholars and the general public access to little-known and often completely unknown documents and books.

The Jewish Week, New YIVO Project Digitizes, Reunites Ransacked Pre-War Archive (September 29, 2014)

If you pick up any piece of paper from the archives, you will learn something you never even imagined about Jewish life.

Le Monde, L’Histoire devant soi (April 27, 2015)

Le petit bureau est caché, loin, au fond des Archives centrales d’Etat de Lituanie. Pour y accéder, il faut traverser un long bâtiment de style soviétique de la banlieue de Vilnius, franchir plusieurs couloirs sans âme, emprunter un ascenseur à la lumière chiche. La clé tourne, on écarte les stores et une lumière blanche jaillit sur des centaines, des milliers de pages, de livres, de classeurs et de cartons : le trésor des archives de l’Institut YIVO...

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