Yad Vashem Becomes Institutional Partner on YIVO Vilna Collections Project

New York, NY – The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (YIVO) is pleased to announce a new partnership with Yad Vashem for the digitization of YIVO’s pre-World War II archives, which were rescued from the destruction of the Holocaust. Yad Vashem will contribute financial support for the digitization of important documents looted by the Nazis which were recovered with the help of U.S. Army and brought to New York in the late 1940s.

The documents, collected by YIVO in its original headquarters in Wilno, Poland (now Vilnius, Lithuania) in the 1920s-30s, are a diverse resource on Jewish life, community, and culture in Europe. They span the range from handwritten autobiographies by Jewish youth and humble folk tales and folk songs to the archives of scholars, such as that of Simon Dubnow, known as the father of Russian Jewish history. They include photographs, Yiddish theater and political posters, and the administrative records of Yiddish and Hebrew schools and yeshivas.

“We are happy to revive a partnership that dates back to the period right after World War II,” notes YIVO Executive Director Jonathan Brent. Yad Vashem was founded in Israel in 1953 as a world center for documentation, research, education and commemoration of the Holocaust. YIVO relocated to New York in 1940. “In the 1950s, YIVO and Yad Vashem cooperated in the research and publication of some of the first documentation of the Holocaust in the Joint Documentary Projects at Yad Vashem and YIVO. Now it is fitting that the materials we are digitizing will be available to researchers in these two centers of Holocaust research and scholarship, in Jerusalem and New York.”

The digitized materials will be available on a website hosted by YIVO and in the reading room at Yad Vashem. YIVO’s other institutional partners on the project include the Lithuanian Central State Archives and the Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania.

For press inquiries, contact:

Melissa S. Cohen
Chief Development Officer
(212) 294-6156

Sarah Ponichtera
Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Collections Project Manager
(212) 294-6119