YIVO's 2020 Roundup
2020 was a uniquely challenging year for everyone, but thanks to our incredible members and supporters, YIVO was able to continue in its mission and ensure that our global audience was able to access enriching content. Here’s a few highlights:
The Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Online Collections Project
The YIVO Archivists working on the Project were presented with unique challenges to overcome when everyone began working remotely in March. The archival documents rescued from Nazi destruction by the Vilna Paper Brigade are housed in YIVO’s headquarters, which were inaccessible for several months. Despite this, work on the Project has continued. To date, YIVO has digitized 100% of the library, comprising approximately one million pages and 56% of the Vilna Collection. Visitors to vilnacollections.yivo.org/Collections-Online can find pre-war geometry textbooks, illustrated children's books such as Bebl Bebl Bob, and records from the Yiddish Actors Union in Poland—just to start. Documents span numerous languages, leading with Yiddish, Russian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Polish, Hebrew, and English.
YIVO’s Shine Online Educational Series
Our fourth online course, A Seat at the Table: A Journey into Jewish Food, supported by Edward Blank and Family, The Covenant Foundation, and The Shine Trust, launched to rave reviews in May 2020. Featuring acclaimed chefs, cookbook authors, scholars, restaurateurs, & writers, the course ventures across centuries of Jewish history and culture, exploring the evolution of Ashkenazi Jewish cuisine. At the start of the pandemic, YIVO made all of its Shine Online courses free. Since then, over 17,000 people have registered for our online courses from 60 countries around the world.
Education at YIVO
There has been a rising interest in all things Yiddish as people crave social connection and links to their heritage. Enrollment in our Uriel Weinreich Program in Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture grew by over 70% this July to 120 students from 14 countries. After 52 years of on-site classes, the Weinrich Program transitioned to online learning for the first time. Running a dynamic online language immersion program was complex but rewarding. Students loved it! This fall, we tripled our Yiddish classes due to increased demand to discover our beautiful language, history, and culture. These trends have continued into 2021, and we anticipate even more classes this year.
Public Programs
In 2020, we dramatically increased our digital programming and the use of social media. Audience attendance and participation have skyrocketed in response. We began holding events on Zoom, Facebook, and YouTube, including content filmed on-site to provide special behind-the-scenes tours of Archival materials. We hosted nearly 100 public programs covering a range of Jewish life, history, and culture, including: Sukkot Around the World, a virtual gala celebrating the diversity of Jewish cuisines around the globe; Why the Far Right Kills, in which researcher Chip Berlet and journalist Talia Lavin discuss the Far Right’s themes of demonization, scapegoating, conspiracism and apocalypticism; concerts, from Joel Engel's "Jewish Folksongs" Volumes I & II, featuring little-known first classical compositions to employ Yiddish folksongs, to Continuing Evolution: Yiddish Folksong in Classical Music, premiering five new compositions commissioned by YIVO that engage with Yiddish folksongs; and Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese Food, which was joined live by over 1,600 viewers.
YIVO Bruce and Francesca Cernia Slovin Online Museum
This August, YIVO launched its landmark YIVO Bruce and Francesca Cernia Slovin Online Museum with its first interactive exhibition, Beba Epstein: The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Girl. The exhibition explores East European Jewish life in the 20th and 21st centuries through the true story of one young girl. Developed by YIVO in consultation with scholars and Beba Epstein’s family, the exhibition combines innovative technology with first-rate storytelling to showcase rare materials from YIVO’s archive of more than 23 million documents and artifacts. This is the first public presentation of Beba’s childhood autobiography from the 1930s. The YIVO Cernia Slovin Museum is available free of charge to the global public at museum.yivo.org. Since its launch, over 10,000 people from 92 countries have visited the exhibition, and it has been featured in many publications, among them the New York Times, NY1, Maariv, South African Jewish Report, The Forward, Jewish Chronicle UK, and Jewish Week. It was the subject of an event at the United Nations, and the winner of a Vega Digital Award. It was also developed as a resource for Holocaust learning in K-12 curriculum and is being used in classrooms in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia, by both Jewish and non-Jewish schools.