YIVO information

Chairwoman Faina Kukliansky’s Speech at the Lithuanian Parliament at Commemoration of the Day of Mourning and Hope and the Day of Occupation and Genocide

LŽB pirmininkės Fainos Kukliansky kalba Lietuvos Respublikos Seime, minėjime, skirtame Gedulo ir vilties bei Okupacijos ir genocido dienoms atminti

Over the entirety of Lithuania’s 25 years of independence the Lithuanian Jewish Community hasn’t had the opportunity to share our thoughts publicly during the marking of the Day of Mourning and Hope at the Parliament of the Republic of Lithuania. Seventy-five years have passed since the beginning of the mass deportations of Lithuanian citizens. For the Jewish people, who suffered prophetic exile from the times of the Assyrians, Babylonians and Romans, the experience of exile could be considered part of our historical identity. Seventy-five years ago about one precent of the Lithuanian Jewish community at that time were deported, and as a percentage represent the largest group to be deported from Lithuania. State repression did not put an end to Jewish identity: Zionist organizations operated underground, there was a Hebrew educational system, and all sorts of measures were employed to enable members of the Jewish community to leave for Palestine.

According to Jewish historiography, during the deportations of June, 1941, alone about 3,000 Jews were deported, including Jewish activists from the left and right side of the political spectrum and owners of large industrial enterprises and factories, with about 7,000 people being deported in total during the first year of Soviet rule. On the eve of the first Soviet occupation the majority of Lithuanian Jews were involved in different cultural, social and political organizations and associations. The tradition of Zionism, however, has always been especially strong in the Lithuanian Jewish community; in Lithuania between the two world wars members of the Jewish conservative cultural orientation were the most active and influential, and spoke out for the creation of an independent Jewish nation-state in Palestine. In this regard the confrontation with the Soviet system was especially vivid.

Solomon Atamuk reports there 16 Jewish daily newspapers, 30 weeklies and 13 non-periodical publications as well as 20 collections of literature being published in Lithuania before World War II. After the June 14, 1940 ultimatum to Lithuania and the consequent occupation the Jewish community soon experienced social and cultural repression. All newspapers, belong both to organizations on the Jewish political left and the right, were shut down. Even the Folksblat newspaper, popular with Communists and issued by the Jewish People’s Party, was closed.

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YIVO Awarded $260,000 by NEH

YIVO Receives $260,000 Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities
May 16, 2016

New York, NY – The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (YIVO) is pleased to announce that is a recipient of a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for the Vilna Collections Project, a seven-year initiative to preserve, digitize and virtually reunite YIVO’s prewar archives and library located in New York City and Vilnius, Lithuania, through a dedicated web portal.

The NEH’s Division of Preservation and Access has awarded $260,000 over two years for the processing, conservation and digitization of rare archival documents rescued from the destruction of the Holocaust. The materials, looted by the Nazis and recovered with the help of the U.S. Army, were brought to New York in the late 1940s. They are a diverse resource on Jewish life, community and culture in Europe. They span the range from handwritten autobiographies by Jewish youth and humble folktales 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.

As City University of New York historian Jack Jacobs noted in a letter of support for YIVO’s application to the NEH, “It is simply impossible to write a dissertation or do any serious research project related to Eastern European Jewry without consulting the YIVO materials.”

Full story here.

Lithuania to Grant 30,000 Euros to Vilnius YIVO Project in 2017

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The Lithuanian Ministry of Culture plans to allocate 30,000 euros in 2017 for the Vilnius YIVO project.

The Vilnius YIVO project is a seven-year endeavor to preserve, digitize and join together virtually two pre-war YIVO collections in New York and Vilnius. The project will also attempt to recreate digitally the Strashun library, one of the largest collections of judaica in pre-war Europe. YIVO, the Lithuanian Central State Archives and the Lithuanian Martynas Mažvydas National Library are partners in the project.

The project covers approximately 10,000 rare and unique books and publications and around 1.5 million documents. Material includes literary works, correspondence, memoirs, theater posters, photography, rare books, brochures, newspapers, political pamphlets and documentation of religious and communal activities.

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Opening of Exhibit “YIVO in Vilnius: The Legend Begins”

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You are invited to the opening of the exhibit “YIVO in Vilnius: The Legend Begins” at the Lithuanian National Museum at Arsenalo street no. 1 in Vilnius at 4:00 P.M., February 18. Exhibit curators: Dr. Lara Lempertienė and Dr. Giedrė Jankevičiūtė.

The exhibit was created to celebrate the 90th anniversary of the creation of YIVO in Vilnius. It includes previously unseen material from Lithuanian state collections on the history and work of YIVO. It demonstrates how YIVO’s work gave stimulus to the intellectual life of the Jews of Vilnius and the wider Central and Eastern European arena. It also presents the city and urban community as a source of inspiration and as the historical and cultural hearth and sustenance for the institute’s work. The exhibit was first shown at the Galicia Jewish museum in Cracow from September 30 to November 8, 2015. The exhibit to open in Vilnius contains additional material.

Conference to mark the 90th anniversary of YIVO

In 1925, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research was founded in Vilna (Wilno, Poland; now Vilnius, Lithuania), by key European intellectuals, including Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, to record the history and pioneer in the critical study of the language, literature and culture of the Jews of Eastern Europe. In 1940, YIVO moved its permanent headquarters to New York City, becoming the only pre-Holocaust institution to transfer its mission to the United States from Europe. In 1941, the Nazis destroyed YIVO in Vilna and ransacked the archives and library. A portion of YIVO’s archives was sent to Frankfurt to become the basis of the Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question; another part was hidden in Vilna; another part was destroyed. In 1946, the U.S. Army discovered the seized YIVO materials in the train depot in Offenbach, Germany and returned them to YIVO. The part that remained in Vilna was saved from the Soviets by a Lithuanian librarian, and remained hidden in the basement of a church until 1989. In 2014, YIVO along with its partners the Central State Archives of Lithuania and the National Library of Lithuania, launched the YIVO Vilna Collections, a seven-year project to preserve, digitize and virtually reunite YIVO’s prewar archives located in New York City and Vilnius, Lithuania. The project encompasses some 10,000 rare or unique publications and approximately 1.5 million documents to add to the existing 24 million documents and 385,000 books and periodicals the YIVO Archives and the YIVO Library currently hold. The conference in Vilnius will feature top YIVO officials, researchers and prominent members of Lithuanian, US and Israeli academia delivering presentations on a wide ranging variety of topics regarding the political, social and cultural context of the founding of YIVO, its current activities and future prospects.

Klezmatics Live!

Presented by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the Jewish Community of Lithuania: The Klezmatics, the gold standard of the klezmer revival, are celebrating their 30th anniversary! Rather than rest on their laurels ground-breaking recordings, a Grammy award, collaborations with the likes of Chava Alberstein, Itzhak Perlman, Allen Ginsberg, Tony Kushner and Woody Guthrie the band continues to push boundaries. Letters To Afar is an ongoing artistic collaboration between the Klezmatics and the award-winning video artist Péter Forgács that brings to life the rich and vibrant life of Jews in inter-war Poland using historical film footage from the YIVO Institute. The original ground-breaking video art installation was commissioned by POLIN and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in 2013 and has been seen by over 100,000 people on two continents.

Reading from the Diary of Yitzchak Rudashevski

Yitzchak Rudashevski was born in Vilna in 1927 – his father, Eliyahu, worked in a publishing house, and his mother, Rosa, was a seamstress. In September 1941, when Yitzchak was not yet 14 years old, the Nazis forced the boy and his family into the Vilna Ghetto. At some point during the Nazi occupation, Yitzchak started writing a diary in Yiddish where he described the day to day horrors the Jewish population had to endure. In the main part of the diary, which encompasses the period from September 1942 to April 1943, the young man chronicled all aspects of the ghetto, using his literary talents to not only describe, but also to reflect with great clarity and insight for a 15 year-old upon what was happening within the walls of the houses and streets he had been confined to.  As the author himself put it, “I consider that everything must be recorded and noted down, even the most gory, because everything will be taken into account”. In the fall of 1943, as the Vilna Ghetto was being liquidated, the Rudashevskis managed to hide away in a secret shelter, but after only two weeks the Nazis discovered their hiding place and executed everyone. Only Sarah Voloshin, Yitzchak’s cousin, managed to escape and flee to the forests surrounding Vilna. After the Soviets re-occupied the town in the summer of 1944, she returned to the shelter and found a small notebook, its more than 200 pages filled with handwriting, some in pen, and some in pencil. It was the diary of Yitzchak Rudashevski.