Dirty jokes and sacred texts: YIVO marks 100 years of preserving Yiddish culture
Artifacts from 1,000 years of Ashkenazi Jewish life including literary transcripts, Herzl’s diary, everyday notes and children’s scrawls connect prewar Jews with generations to come
Reporter at The Times of Israel
NEW YORK — On the third floor of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Stefanie Halpern, director of archives, carefully held up a nearly century-old agricultural map of what was then Belorussia. Farms, fields, and rivers dotted the front; a rather raunchy and convoluted story in Yiddish covered the back.
By itself, the antique artifact is a snapshot of Jewish agricultural life. More broadly, it speaks to the thriving Yiddish culture that was found in thousands of Eastern European shtetls and cities. Now, as YIVO marks its centennial, the map is a reminder of the institution’s commitment to preserving these stories while ensuring its collections resound with future generations.
“YIVO’s collections, programming and educational initiatives tell the story of what we have cherished, what we have endured, and how we have persisted. It is the story from which the future of the Jewish people will be built,” said Jonathan Brent, YIVO executive director and CEO.
To visit YIVO’s Manhattan archives — which holds 75 percent of the Institute’s more than 24 million items — is to stand amid the largest collection of Eastern European artifacts in the world. In short, to stand in the archives is to stand at the epicenter of 1,000 years of Ashkenazi Jewish life.
“It’s all here: Anarchist, Zionist, Bundist, and Nationalist. We have texts from ribald Yiddish joke books to the most sacred texts. All of it represents the richness of Jewish life in the Diaspora. A letter from a water carrier is every bit as important as the letters from Sholem Aleichem,” Brent said, sitting in his office. Crammed as it is with books and photos, papers and pens, it feels like an extension of the archives.
A group of Jewish intellectuals founded YIVO on March 24, 1925, in Vilna, Poland (now Vilnius, Lithuania). The first comprehensive center for higher Jewish learning in Eastern Europe, its founders wanted to document everyday Jewish life.
And so they assembled a contingent of zamlers, or amateur collectors, and had them fan across the countryside. Over the next few decades, this team of carpenters and tailors, doctors and fruit sellers gathered music, photographs, folktales and more.
“The idea was to preserve a disappearing culture from encroaching modernity. They had these questionnaires that asked things like, ‘What curses do you use in the marketplace? What stories about kings and queens do you know? How do you celebrate Purim? Do you keep Shabbat and how?’’’ said Halpern, who has worked at the institution since 2016.
YIVO’s mission took a drastic turn in 1942 after the Nazis occupied Lithuania. Now singularly focused on saving Jewish culture from extinction, its team of poets and scholars, dubbed the “Paper Brigade,” raced to rescue documents and artifacts. They then sent them to New York City, where YIVO headquarters had relocated in 1940.
Because of the Paper Brigade, YIVO’s New York holdings, which span 17,000 linear feet, now include over 400,000 volumes, including 2,000 rare and unique volumes dating back to the 16th century. It also boasts the largest collection of Yiddish-language books, pamphlets, and newspapers worldwide.
Among the most intriguing items found in the stacks are fragments of the play “Der Dibek,” an early 20th-century precursor to “The Exorcist” written in Yiddish by Shloyme Rapaport, better known by his pen name, S. Ansky.
According to information provided by early YIVO archivists of the 1950s, Hayim Nahman Bialik, a Hebrew poet, translated the original version into Hebrew.
After a fire destroyed the early Yiddish manuscript, Ansky translated Bialik’s Hebrew version into Yiddish; a few fragmentary pages of that work were saved in the Vilna Ghetto.
Another gem is Theodore Herzl’s garnet-red, leatherbound diary in which the father of modern Zionism recorded his thoughts between 1881 and 1884.
“It’s mostly about what he was reading, but it contains the seeds of what he was thinking in relation to the need for a Jewish homeland,” Halpern said.
Holding up another, rather grim artifact — a portrait of a Nazi official — Halpern turned the painting around to reveal that it was rendered on no ordinary canvas, but a piece of parchment from a desecrated Torah scroll.
“It wasn’t enough to destroy Jewish people through murder, they wanted to culturally exterminate them as well,” she said.
One of the most poignant artifacts in YIVO’s collection is what’s known as the “Lodz Ghetto Book of the Children.” A hand-painted book given to the Jewish Council head on the eve of Rosh Hashanah 1942, it contains the signatures of 14,587 students and 715 teachers; only approximately 200 of the children who signed the book survived. A non-Jewish postman’s quick thinking saved the book when the ghetto was liquidated in 1943 and he threw it down a dry well and covered it with mattresses.
Also thanks to the Paper Brigade, YIVO holds the largest collection of primary source Holocaust materials outside Yad Vashem. Yet, as vital as the Institute’s Holocaust collection is, so too are the holdings related to the flourishing Yiddish culture found in the United States and elsewhere.
For example, there is a box containing about a dozen mourning pins and ribbons bearing the likeness of famous Yiddish actors and screenwriters such as Jacob Gordin. The Ukrainian-born immigrant, who died June 11, 1909, believed theater should both educate and entertain.
“People used to buy the buttons and wear them, the same way people post pictures on social media or their favorite celebrities today,” Halpern said.
As YIVO commemorates its 100th year, it will continue to link the past to the present with events, exhibitions, publications, and public programs in New York City, Warsaw and Vilnius.
Coinciding with the anniversary is the publication of the late Chaim Grade’s “Sons and Daughters.” The last and previously untranslated novel by Grade, whom Elie Wiesel once described as “one of the greatest — if not the greatest — contemporary Yiddish novelists,” was painstakingly translated from Yiddish into English over the course of eight years.
Additionally, a new learning and media center will open in June to give students and the general public access to professionally curated primary source materials. That same month, YIVO will release “100 Objects from the Collections of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.” The illustrated coffee table book contains images and essays representing modern Jewish history and culture through YIVO’s century of collecting.
Meanwhile, YIVO will continue digitizing its collection.
It recently completed a seven-year, $7 million project to digitize 1.5 million documents. As of 2024, about 700,000 people have used these materials online, for free.
Next up is an eight-year, $8 million project to digitize YIVO’s Jewish Labor and Political Archives. That project will make available about 3.5 million documents, most of them heretofore unknown to the general public.
“YIVO shows the whole part of Jewish creativity to anyone who cares to look — the kind of energy that we as Jews have, the contributions we make; even as we have at times lived in the most difficult of circumstances. It shows we are a dynamic creative people,” Brent said.
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