Call of the Hour

How did this enormous collection come to be?

The YIVO origin story begins in Imperial Czarist Russia of the 19th century (which included today’s Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania and Poland), host to the largest Jewish community in the world, totaling more than five million Jews. Various challenges faced Russian Jewry in the closing years of the 19th century, including secularization, the lure of nationalist and revolutionary movements, and state-sponsored vicious anti-Semitism under the brutal rule of the Romanovs. The future was unclear.

Amid that concern for the future came an appeal for history. In 1892 a slim Hebrew pamphlet appeared in Odessa in Czarist Russia entitled Nachpesa Venachkora (literally, Let Us Seek and Investigate). Its intended audience was the masses of traditional and religious Jews across the Pale of Settlement. Its author was the then-young but already prominent Jewish historian Shimon Dubnow. The subtitle concisely summarized the stated goal of this pamphlet: “A clarion call to the wise of the People to volunteer to collect material for the purpose of constructing the history of our People in Poland & Russia.” The title page repeated the aforementioned title and subtitle, and then added the famous pasuk as a clarion call for the imperative of engaging with Jewish history. “Zechor yemos olam, binu shnos dor vador! — Remember the days of old; contemplate the years of past generations!”

Original copies of Dubnow’s call to preserve Jewish history are incredibly rare, and considering the almost ephemeral nature of a booklet such as this, I receive an authentic original from the YIVO archive with extra instructions to handle it with care. Donning gloves and using a special metal thin sort of stick to turn the brittle pages, I travel back to the Pale of Settlement, where Dubnow sounded his call.

Dubnow opens his soliloquy by setting his goals for this modest booklet:

“In my book ‘Regarding the Research of Russian Jewish History’, and the accompanying kol korei which I published last year in Russian, I appealed to the wise of our nation to assist with the preservation of our history. Scattered materials should be gathered, and everyone should contribute to this effort of gathering materials according to their capabilities, so that this edifice of Jewish history shall be constructed. All of this is in order that we should know what took place over the course of the 800 years that we have resided in these areas of the lands of Poland until today.

…Detailed instructions will be included  regarding how to collect documents, which ones should be copied, what should be sought after and researched, and in general how to partake in this great and honorable project. Through this we will be able to bring to fruition this noble ideal, and to remove the mask which is covering our collective past in the land which we currently inhabit.”

An Army of Zamlers

Who was Shimon Dubnow and what was he trying to accomplish with this appeal to Russian Jewry?

By the time he was murdered by the Nazis, Dubnow would be counted as one of the greatest historians of Jewish history in modern times. His many works are studied until this very day. Although completely secular in both practice and outlook, he had a deep sense of Jewish pride and a great respect for tradition, and was greatly worried about the wave of assimilation sweeping away many of his people. Lacking a personal framework of Torah study and mitzvah observance, he felt the key to preserving the Jewish nation was reinforcing a strong sense of Jewish identity in various ways — primary among them a deep connection to Jewish history.

But how does one connect to the shared collective experience of Jewish history? Most nations and societies have national institutions that collect, contain, chronicle, preserve, and conserve their past. As a minority, and generally a persecuted minority, the Jewish People didn’t have that luxury. Dubnow realized that this limitation actually presented a unique opportunity. The Jewish nation as a whole could actively build and preserve its own past, telling its own story, and in the process reinforce its own identity. And thus the zamling movement was born.

Dubnow envisioned a veritable army of zamlers — Yiddish for collectors — of materials across the Pale of Settlement. Their collection efforts wouldn’t just create a living monument to the past; the act of collecting itself would serve as a powerful tool for self-preservation and self-identity.

Dubnow’s call met with limited success. Some valuable material relating to kehillah life, including pinkasim (communal records), was salvaged from oblivion, along with other historic records and artifacts. Dubnow and his cohorts in the Jewish Historical Ethnographic Society in St. Petersburg published some of that material during the last decade of Czarist Russia, prior to the Bolshevik revolution.

Then, in March 1924, a Jewish historian, activist, linguist, and Yiddish scholar named Nachum Shtif published a paper entitled “Regarding a Yiddish Academic Institute.” His proposal was to take Dubnow’s idea even further and establish a scholarly institution dedicated to enriching Jewish life through the study of history, the Yiddish language, economics of the Jewish People, education, literature, and other subjects.

Though secular in nature, the institution would not espouse any specific political or religious ideology. It was to serve as a central organization for the entire Jewish People, irrespective of any ideological stance. And Shtif hoped it would create a stronger and prouder Jewish society.

A group of scholars heeded Shtif’s call, and on March 24, 1925, they met in Vilna to discuss the plan. That August another conference was held in Berlin, this time with Max Weinreich and Elias Tcherikower — both of whom would serve as heads of the newly established institution — in attendance, and YIVO was born. By the fall of 1925, the main headquarters in Vilna was operational, with activities in Berlin, Warsaw, and soon in New York as well.

From its start, YIVO had a clearly defined — and extremely insightful — agenda, which was articulated quite succinctly by Max Weinreich, the guiding light of YIVO’s mission from its founding until his passing in 1969. In a 1931 article he laid out what YIVO’s agenda should be: “Only on the basis of Reb Yisrael can we learn about Klal Yisrael.”

By studying the Jewish People as both a collective and as individuals, rising above all ideologies and recognizing the diversity of the nation, and acknowledging that every aspect of its existence was significant, Weinreich and his colleagues set about to study nothing less than the entirety of the Jewish People’s collective and individual stories.

And it wasn’t just for study’s sake: Weinreich, who was himself not religious, was nevertheless worried about assimilation. He believed in Dubnow’s theory that Jewish pride could stem the tide, strengthen Jewish immigrants to the US who were building new homes there, and fortify their children for the challenges of the interwar world. As YIVO CEO and executive director Dr. Jonathan Brent puts it, “Dubnow already understood that creating this self-identity was essential for self-preservation.”

By the People, For the People

Weinreich wanted YIVO to be a household name, for the people and by the people. Just as Dubnow had done in 1892, he appealed directly to the people and invited them to partake in the creation of their own history.

How does one go about doing that? In the simplest way imaginable. Weinreich distributed advertisements in every conceivable Yiddish newspaper in Eastern Europe and throughout the world, which basically requested without too much drama, “Send us stuff.” Astoundingly enough, they did. The response was overwhelming, as Jews around the world began sending documents, artifacts, and even photos to YIVO’s Vilna headquarters.

Jonathan Brent recalls a visit to Vilna several years ago to oversee the transfer of some boxes of YIVO materials discovered by a Lithuanian librarian. Upon entering the room, he was shocked to see the boxes in their original YIVO markings, untouched and unopened since the 1940s. He asked the Lithuanian archivists what they had been waiting for. “We were waiting for you!” they said. They knew that the Jewish People would one day return to reclaim their cultural heritage.

So he randomly opened a box on the table. The first item he pulled out was a 1934 poster inviting the Yiddish-speaking immigrant community of Chicago to a Yiddish play. Dr. Brent stood flabbergasted. His father had attended that very play in Chicago in 1934. Apparently someone in the audience had intentionally taken down one of the event posters and mailed it to YIVO in Vilna, because he had seen Weinreich’s ad in the paper and thought this might be noteworthy for the collection.

Yiddish was, in fact, of central importance to the YIVO founders They saw something central in the language spoken by the masses. And they viewed it not as a poorly spoken dialect of German sprinkled with a Slavic influence, but rather as an authentic and living language. A language that deserved respect — worthy of use in books, research, science, literature, poetry, and any other literary product.

For Dr. Brent, an early exposure to Yiddish foreshadowed his career at YIVO by quite a few decades. Before he knew Max Weinreich’s approach to Jewish history, language and people, he was an all-American kid growing up in Chicago with no knowledge of Yiddish. At age eight, he overheard his immigrant grandparents conversing in what sounded like a foreign language. Observing the perplexed look of incomprehension on his face, Jonathan’s grandmother turned to him and said, in broken English, “You don’t understand this funny little language.”

The self-mockery hit the little boy hard. “There and then,” Dr. Brent remembers, “I made up my mind that I was never going to refer to Yiddish as a ‘funny little language.’ This is a language that my grandparents are speaking. They are not funny little people.”

Everything Is Important

Despite its very secular nature, YIVO often viewed itself in almost religious terms. In a comparison that would likely sound sacrilegious to the Orthodox ear, Max Weinreich described YIVO and its activities as “a Kabbalist who succeeded in drawing the nitzotzos out of the klipos.”

Or consider how Jonathan Brent reflects on YIVO’s collection of 24 million documents.

“With ordinary Jewish daily life, ordinary Jewish people, shopkeepers,” he says, “everything is important, nothing is trivial. That’s actually a chassidic and kabbalistic idea — that nothing is trivial, and everything has its importance, even the mundane and simple which we would normally dismiss.”

A random autobiography in the YIVO autobiography collection authored by Polish Jewish teenagers — one of the entries in an autobiography contest run by Max Weinreich — provides a perfect illustration of the simple being profound. In the autobiography, a 12-year-old girl, in simple and succinct language, describes her grandfather, a resident of a small Polish shtetl. A shopkeeper by trade, he initiated a personal custom of purchasing schoolbooks and seforim on behalf of all the students at the local Talmud Torah.

This was an anonymous, simple nobody who had a sense of the past and potential future, all running through the channel of Torah education. And he wanted to play his own part in that story.

We’d never know this beautiful account, and thousands of others like it, if not for the fact that this 12-year-old girl wished to participate in the YIVO autobiography contest, which led to its preservation in the archive. (The original biography, along with the other 600 or so in this incredible collection, is still available in the original Yiddish handwritten pages of the author. Many of these stories have already been translated to English and Hebrew and have already been published. Others are still waiting to be redeemed.)

Even in the Ghetto

During the dark era of the 1930s, as Eastern-European Jewry struggled with rising anti-Semitism, desperate financial straits, and a dimming future, critics doubted whether YIVO was helpful or even necessary; perhaps the effort to collect charming posters and publish interesting essays was better saved for a less grinding time.

Max Weinreich begged to differ. Celebrating YIVO’s “bar mitzvah” in 1938, he declared that YIVO’s activities weren’t a luxury; they were essential, especially as the going got increasingly rough.

Jews, he pointed out, historically looked beyond any current crisis towards a brighter future.

“Even in a time when forests are burning, there are firemen who put out the fire, but luckier are those who can raise flowers that will later beautify the forest,” Weinreich said.

These words proved almost prophetic with the onset of the Holocaust shortly thereafter. When I mention to Jonathan Brent that prior to the establishment of Yad Vashem in 1953, YIVO was the only institution in the world where Holocaust survivors could submit Holocaust-related materials, he points out something profound. “We were also collecting material during the war.”

In fact, two of the greatest initiatives to collect and preserve material related to the destruction and extermination of European Jewry were undertaken under the most extreme circumstances by the victims themselves in real time.

It was YIVO staff such as Zelig      Kalmanovich along with young activists such as Avraham Sutzkever (known as the “Paper Brigade”) who rescued much of the original YIVO archive and other Jewish literary and cultural treasures of prewar Vilna. As Brent pointed out, the dedicated group also created a record of daily life in the ghetto.

The most famous cache of Holocaust-era documents, however, is the Oyneg Shabbos archive of the Warsaw Ghetto. This archive was the brainchild of the historian Dr. Emanuel Ringelblum, one of the leading young historians of interwar Poland and a faithful adherent to the YIVO “by the people, for the people” approach.

When Ringelblum initiated the bold and risky venture of recording Jewish life in all of its detail within the ghetto, he utilized the YIVO zamling approach. The public was engaged to submit materials; questionnaires were distributed in order to gain a better understanding of Jewish life in adverse conditions; and special focus was placed on the rank-and-file Jewish mothers, children, simple laborers, and how they confronted life and survival.

The secular Ringelblum even recruited Rav Shimon Huberband as one of the leading archivists of Oyneg Shabbos. A prominent chassidic rav who harbored a love for Jewish history, Rav Huberband had already authored highly regarded history works before the war.

In the ghetto, Ringelblum delegated Rav Huberband to collect material, conduct interviews, and record the rich religious life taking place within the ghetto walls. His amassed material, which survived along with most of the archive, includes a collection of stories and an essay on Kiddush Hashem, one of the richest sources of this genre which survived the war. In all likelihood, it was Rav Shimon Huberband who convinced the Piaseczner Rebbe, Rav Kalonymous Kalman Shapira, to submit written transcripts of the talks he gave to his chassidim in the Warsaw Ghetto. Thus his monumental work, a testimony of how a renowned rebbe viewed the Holocaust in real time and compiled as the sefer Aish Kodesh, survived the war as part of the Oyneg Shabbos archive.

Where History Is Current

There are many miles between the historic YIVO headquarters of Vilna and its current home today in Manhattan. The transfer of YIVO’s archive — a complex and daring smuggling operation during and after the war — was immortalized in Dr. David Fishman’s monumental book The Book Smugglers, which records the annals of the smugglers known as the “Paper Brigade.”

Max Weinreich, Elias Tcherikower, and other heads of YIVO made it to the United States at the beginning of the war, reestablishing YIVO’s headquarters in Manhattan. Though they’d initially viewed YIVO’s foundational work as engaging the public to write their own history, the trauma of the Holocaust led them to shift their focus on building this archival monument to the world that was and is no longer.

Today, YIVO is marked by a scholarly ambiance and cerebral atmosphere — quiet, organized, and very purposeful. The researchers and archivists who move through the building seem worlds away from the original zamlers who enthusiastically flooded YIVO with letters, amateur memoirs, posters, and photos. Surrounded by pages and pages of history, they certainly seem to inhabit a different mindscape than the contemporary digital generation. Which leads us to wonder: In a world of instant communication and gratification, how many Jews are interested in YIVO’s historic treasures?

Many more than we would have predicted, it turns out.

In an effort to introduce its holdings to the digital generation, YIVO has undertaken an ongoing project to digitize their vast collections. Over three million pages are currently online, with many more being processed and scanned for digitization as we speak. Once the material became accessible to anyone worldwide through digitization, YIVO themselves were surprised by the wider public’s thirst for connection to Jewish history and our collective and individual past: During its first year of online access, 250,000 people have read and used YIVO’s materials, and in its second year 700,000 people worldwide have used and read YIVO materials online.

“That’s a vast reach,” Dr. Brent says. “It shows us how important this is to our people — and how desperately we need to reestablish that consciousness that Max Weinreich and Shtiff and others were so eager to begin to form at that time, because that consciousness is not lost.”

Brought to Life

Back in the reading room, Dovi finds a Satmar mosdos fundraiser from the 1950s, a Yiddish internal memo describing the efforts to rescue Rav Meir Shapiro’s remains from Lublin — where the cemetery was about to be destroyed by the Communists — and rebury him on Har Hamenuchos in Israel, a 1940s invitation to the Mizrachi national dinner, a Yiddish handwritten Rosh Hashanah card from 1930, an original Bintel Brief — the legendary “letters to the editor” in the Yiddish newspaper Forverts, and a series of telegrams and letters associated with the fundraising efforts of the Vilna-based Vaad Hayeshivos, all over the course of one afternoon.

As we open folder after folder and gingerly handle these precious documents, we wonder how many eyes have viewed these treasures since they’d been filed away so many scores of years earlier. Attempting to decipher the handwriting on some of these letters, we finger the smudged ink, the folds and creases, and the past became so tangible, so intimate and so close, that we can almost hear the whispers waft up from the yellowed pages, begging to tell their stories.

Some of the riches here are well-known, like legendary photographer Roman Vishniac’s photos of Jewish life in prewar Eastern Europe. But for all that I was familiar with the photos beforehand, actually handling (with special dispensation) the original prints of both the iconic and lesser-known images of Vishniac’s collection is almost walking into a time capsule. The shtetl comes to life: I can hear the children playing, the customers haggling, and the slush of the autumn mud as the chassidim trudge home from shul.

There are other less famous photo collections at YIVO as well: fundraising photos, private collections, Holocaust-era pictures, DP camp images. One of the lesser-known photo collections is that of Menachem Kipnis, a musician and folklorist who regularly contributed to various Yiddish newspapers in Warsaw and New York as a music and theatre critic. Kipnis had a side hobby as a photographer, and though his collection is relatively small, some of his shots are historic. I look and look again at his photos of the great Rebbe of Radzymin, Rav Aharon Menachem Mendel Guterman, briskly striding down a Warsaw street, and the street fighting during the May coup of 1926 that brought Jozef Pilsudski to power. These photos hold history.

Tell Me Your Story

For many years I’ve been fascinated by one particular collection, one of the most prized materials in the YIVO archives: the autobiographies of Polish Jewish children. This contest was spearheaded by Max Weinreich, who advertised in the Yiddish press for teenagers and children to submit the story of their lives to YIVO and possibly win a cash prize. Each ad included clear and detailed writing guidelines to help the children record their backgrounds and surroundings, their hopes and aspirations, their challenges and disappointments.

The contest was held in three stages over the 1930’s — 1932, 1934, 1939 — with over 600 submissions. The children spanned the entire gamut of Polish Jewish life. There were submissions from shtetlach and large urban centers, from religious and secular, Zionist and Bundist, middle class and working class, rich and poor, educated and provincial, boys and girls. Although the overwhelming majority of the entries were handwritten in Yiddish, a handful were written in Polish, and a couple were even penned in Hebrew.

While almost all of Poland’s Jewish children were ultimately murdered in the Holocaust, most of the YIVO autobiographies survived, and they provide some of the most insightful and fascinating depictions of Polish Jewish life from the perspective of its youth. Three collections of 20 or so autobiographies have been published with commentary, one in Hebrew, another in English, and a third in Polish. Yet that is just an initial effort to tap the potential of this collection, whose value is hard to overstate.

The Polish autobiography project has a lesser-known sister. When Max Weinreich settled in the United States, he initiated another autobiography essay contest in 1942. This time he turned to the generation of immigrants from Eastern Europe who’d found new homes in America.

These entrants were the opposite of youngsters. Most had arrived on American shores during the 45 years of the Great Immigration, between 1881-1924. Weinreich wanted to record their stories: where in Europe they’d come from, why they left, where in the US they settled, and how they’d acclimated.

Considering that I have a bit of an obsession with the history of Jewish immigration, I’m intensely curious to review submissions inside the 20 or so folders from this collection waiting for me in the reading room — handwritten or typed essays detailing, in Yiddish, the vicissitudes of so many individual journeys from the Pale of Settlement or Galicia to a new, unfamiliar world.

Of the over 200 essays submitted, several were translated by a member of YIVO’s staff in the 1960’s. Here is a brief excerpt from a memoir of a woman named Lena Karelitz-Rosenman:

“I am a woman, born in 1880 in a small town, Rozhinoy, in the county of Grodno-Gubernia [not to be confused with Raseinai in Kovno province]. As a member of a balabatishe [upstanding] and poor family, the second of six children: three boys and three girls. … In 1886 many people left for America but not the people of our class. It was a disgrace for a balabatishe family to leave. Only the low-life left. Since there was no other choice, my grandfather gave my father passage money. … One beautiful early morning Mama found out that father had worked on Shabbos. It became a big scandal. She said in no way would she live with a Shabbos law-breaker. She demanded a get. … Time passed and she quieted down and didn’t demand a get anymore ….”

A Team Effort

On the final day of our weeklong visit, we’re treated to an exclusive behind-the-scenes tour of the entire YIVO operation. Our tour guide is the affable (and multilingual) Alex Weiser, who serves as the director of public programs at YIVO.

Our first stop is the conservation and preservation section. Here a team works at the physical preservation of old documents, books, newspapers, posters, artwork, and any artifact which, due to its age, is at risk of being lost to oblivion.

One of the preservationists is using a tiny iron to apply a special sort of glue to a torn newspaper page. “I’m like a dentist for documents,” she says as she shows us her tool kit — small files, chemical solutions, and delicate padding to preserve crumbling edges.

We watch the digitization process as well. In a dark room, page after page is scanned with a noninvasive overhead camera. This is no easy task: Maps are extremely challenging to scan, as is artwork. Large newspapers have to be done section by section. But the more that gets scanned, the more gets uploaded to YIVO’s digital archive, and the more material becomes accessible to the general public.

Next, we proceed to the narrow confines of Yakov Sklar’s office, where one of the most vital elements of making materials accessible takes place — processing. Any collection donated to or otherwise received by YIVO must be organized into intellectual building blocks related by topic. Indexing the material collection by collection wouldn’t be helpful to researchers; the collections are so vast that a general label would do little to identify the contents. Labeling each individual document wouldn’t be helpful either — it would be something like labeling each drop of water in an enormous lake; hardly a help for a researcher trying to locate material. Instead, Yakov organizes the material into folders with 20–30 related documents per folder, labeling each folder with a general description.

Considering the rich diversity of languages in the mountains of documents in YIVO’s archives, does Yakov have to know many languages? Turns out it’s a group effort. Most members of the archival team know a few languages. Many know Slavic languages such as Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish; most know Hebrew and Yiddish; and several know classical European languages such as French and German. But occasionally they’re stumped. Yakov shows us an entire folder of documents in Latvian, and a notice in Georgian. No one currently in YIVO speaks either language, so perhaps they’ll have to rely on AI. The Georgian characters look pretty cool, actually.

Then we briefly met with Vital Zajka, YIVO’s photo archivist. Originally from Minsk, Vital has been working with the 250,000 photos in YIVO’s collections for many years. “More years than I can remember,” he says wryly.

Finally we’re introduced to the legendary archivist of YIVO, Leo Greenbaum. He’s been working at the YIVO archives since 1989, and in other Jewish archives since 1968. He speaks seven languages: Polish (his mamme loshon), English, Yiddish, Hebrew, German, French, and Russian.

“Have you heard of the released Hamas hostage Sagui Dekel-Chen?” Leo asks.

Dekel-Chen, a US citizen released in February 2025 as part of a mediated cease-fire hostage release deal, is the son of Professor Jonathan Dekel-Chen, a prominent historian at Hebrew University. One of the areas of research conducted by Professor Dekel-Chen is Jewish agricultural history. Several years ago he visited YIVO to research the story of the Agro-Joint, a project of the Joint Distribution Committee to help tens of thousands of impoverished Russian Jews find sustenance as farmers in southern Ukraine and the Crimean Peninsula.

Leo assisted Professor Dekel-Chen with his research, which was subsequently published, and when Sagui was taken captive by Hamas on October 7 from Kibbutz Nir Oz, the YIVO archivists felt a personal anguish at the Dekel-Chen family’s ordeal. Their bond may have sprung from the study of 100-year-old texts, but when Sagui Dekel-Chen was finally released after nearly 500 days in Hamas captivity, the team at YIVO celebrated as if their own relative had come home.

Sharing the Wealth

In keeping with its original mission statement, YIVO doesn’t just respond to requests for help; it also makes efforts to actively share its wealth. As Director of Public Programs, Alex Weiser is engaged in a job somewhat akin to outreach, and he tailors each effort to the target demographic.

YIVO’s educational programs often bring high school kids here, he tells me. In order to engage them in a personal and immediate way, he’ll show them some Yiddish excerpts from the children’s autobiography collection, complemented by corresponding archival materials such as photos from those towns, etc. This makes the authors of these stories — children the same age at the visitors — vivid and relatable, not just black-and-white figures from the past.

The most popular effort to reach the public is undoubtedly the online YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. Under the editorial auspices of the late Professor Gershon Hundert, this spectacularly successful encyclopedia is an invaluable resource covering the entire gamut of Eastern European Jewish life, with biographical profiles of rabbanim and every chassidic dynasty, towns, professions, personalities, yeshivos, events, institutions, political parties, seforim, books, and an endless number of entries related to Jewish life in Eastern Europe. The encyclopedia is utilized worldwide, and is the most-used resource ever produced by YIVO.

But the bridges built by YIVO can sometimes be more personal and visceral. At a public press conference, Jonathan Brent recounted the story retold in one of the autobiographies from YIVO’s famous autobiography project — the story of a Jewish girl back in Poland who disappeared during the Holocaust. The New York Times subsequently mentioned the poignant tale in its coverage of the event.

The next day, Dr. Brent received a phone call from Los Angeles. “Is this Dr. Brent from YIVO? That autobiography you mentioned — it was written by my mother!” Turns out she was one of the few Polish children who had survived the Holocaust, built a new family in the United States, and had passed away at a ripe old age several years before. She had never related to her family this unimportant footnote of her life — that she had once participated in an autobiography contest for teenagers in prewar Poland. The family subsequently visited YIVO, where they were presented with her original handwritten autobiography and related materials.

A survivor from the Lodz Ghetto once visited YIVO. “You’re from Lodz?” an archivist said. “Here’s something you might want to see: a book from the Lodz Ghetto that was signed by hundreds of children interned there. Almost all of those children were gassed at the Chelmno death camp. But the book survived. Why don’t we look through it and see if there’s anyone you recognize, since you were a child in the ghetto?”

Sure enough, after much searching, he nearly fainted when he found his own signature.

It’s hard, on an emotional level, to process all those young lives that were eradicated during the Holocaust — but seeing the carefully formed letters of their signatures makes these lost children that much realer. At YIVO, these sorts of personal, individual connections to family roots are being made all the time. Touching the papers, reading the handwriting, seeing the images, people suddenly realize: This was my mother, aunt, someone I knew. Links to the past are reinforced, and identities strengthened.

And now more than ever, that link between appreciation of the past and pride in the present is vital.

YIVO works with a Yiddish program at Columbia University uptown. A Jewish student was studying Yiddish, and asked for a letter of recommendation from his student adviser to continue his studies in Tel Aviv University. The Columbia adviser refused, “because if you’re going to Tel Aviv then you must be a Zionist, and I will have nothing to do with Zionists!”

“In our time, this is the gravest threat to our people,” Dr. Brent says. “It’s not just that there’s Jewish people who are radicalized and opposed to Israel, but also in this climate of rising anti-Semitism, there are so many Jews who are inclined to say, ‘Uch, who cares, why bother being hated, why bother being despised? Let’s just forget the whole thing.’ I don’t want to see that happen. That’s a loss and a tragedy. YIVO’s answer is that the Jewish People has a vision of wholeness that can provide us a reason to be proud of who we are and a reason to continue to thrive.”

The Library Upstairs

During my week in the reading room, I notice an entire upstairs floor full of books. Eddy Portnoy tells me that this is Max Weinreich’s personal library, which he donated to YIVO upon his passing. “Would you like a tour?”

“Is the Pope Catholic?” I immediately respond.

After closing hours, with the room dimmer and quiet, Eddy takes me upstairs and shows me the eclectic collection of this famous Yiddish scholar. His wide range of interests is apparent: The room is filled with classical rabbinical seforim, the full range of Yiddish literature, and scientific books on history, sociology, linguistics, economics, philosophy, and education in German, English, Russian, and other languages.

As we walk around this fascinating library, Eddy regales me with stories of YIVO, his own work here, and the programs he’s run. He told me that when he began researching in the reading room a few decades ago as a doctoral student, the majority of the YIVO staff were still Eastern European Jews, many of them Holocaust survivors who felt a personal stake in their work to immortalize that shattered world.

Some were real characters. Eddy mentions Reb Shaya, the reading room librarian back in the day. Reb Shaya was an old chassid with white beard and peyos who had a phenomenal knowledge of the books and documents in YIVO’s collections. He’d sit at his desk studying the weekly parshas hashavua with Rashi, and young researchers like Eddy would feel kind of guilty interrupting him when they required assistance.

What made this scene even more comical was that due to YIVO’s lack of resources at that time, and the haphazard nature in which the materials were rescued after the war, parts of the archive were still disorganized and mislabeled. Yet when Eddy approached Reb Shaya to point out an apparent discrepancy between the catalogue and a document’s actual location, Reb Shaya would inevitably shrug his shoulders and respond, “What can I do?”

It was as if he was saying, “I’m an old man, don’t bother me with your legitimate requests to fully revamp and reorganize the library, that’s for another generation who has the energy for a new project. The old European generation did enough just by surviving and rebuilding.”

To a certain extent that new generation has arrived. YIVO today is more organized, professional, digitized, and user-friendly than ever. And its American-born, English-as-a-native-language staff are no less passionate about the cause, vision, and mission of YIVO than were their forebears. (Including Max Weinreich, who seems to perpetually peer down at the reading room from his perch in his own library upstairs.)

Own Your History

Spending so much of one’s life deciphering, organizing, and cataloguing records of Jewish life inevitably induces internal shifts. Take the case of Eddy’s son’s bar mitzvah.

Eddy’s wife grew up on a very secular leftist kibbutz in Israel. Though Eddy isn’t Orthodox, he is very traditional, and as appropriate for the senior academic adviser and director of exhibitions at YIVO, he is incredibly knowledgeable about every single aspect of Jewish life.

So when it came time for his son’s bar mitzvah, they chose to celebrate in Israel, on his wife’s kibbutz.

Eddy wanted his son to read from the Torah in honor of the occasion. There was just one problem: Never in the entire history of this particular kibbutz had a sefer Torah graced its anti-religious grounds. So Eddy received special dispensation from the kibbutz administration to bring a borrowed sefer Torah into the kibbutz and use it in a public building for the bar mitzvah ceremony. This was the first time (though hopefully not the last) the Torah was read there.

Standing in Max Weinreich’s library, leaning on the railing and gazing down at the YIVO reading room downstairs, I reflect on the irony of it all. Here I am, a yeshivah guy from Israel who dabbles in Jewish history for a living. I had traveled 6,000 miles to get acquainted with this extraordinary repository of Jewish history here in New York. And I’d discovered a decidedly secular institution that lovingly preserves all of its holdings, including the Vaad Hayeshivos archives, chassidic manuscripts, and countless religious artifacts.

As an endnote to the somewhat bizarre YIVO story, it made perfect sense that a prominent New York-based Yiddish and Jewish history scholar, who does not observe a religious Orthodox lifestyle, insisted on upending a century of antireligious kibbutz policy so his son could read from a sefer Torah.

Back in 1892, Shimon Dubnow ended his Nachpesa Venachkora pamphlet with a plea for the zamling movement to commence across the Pale of Settlement:

I call out to all of you, come join the camp of those who wish to participate in the building of history! Not everyone who is literate can profess to be a writer or historian, but certainly every single one of you can become a gatherer of materials, to assist with the building of our history…. Let’s work together, let’s gather our scattered materials from whichever remote places which they may be found. Let’s organize them, and share them with the general public. And after that we can build a great sanctuary to our People’s history. Nachpesa Venachkora (let us search and research)!

 —Shimon Dubnow; Odessa; 7 Adar 1892.

This stirring call resonated through the walls of YIVO throughout the institute’s century of activity. It resonates with me today in 2025. And I think it can resonate with us all.

History should not be relegated to the domain of scholars, historians, and leaders. Our Jewish history can be owned by all of us. It should be the narrative created by the people themselves, as our own actions create, preserve, and enrich the historical record — thus connecting to the past, providing meaning in the present, and laying the foundations for a bright future

Hunting Down the Husbands

The entrance area of YIVO’s reading room is home to a fascinating exhibit about the agunah crisis — only it’s a crisis that took place in a very different era.

Built by the creative genius of Dr. Eddy Portnoy, who serves as YIVO’s academic adviser and director of exhibitions, the exhibit showcases the National Desertion Bureau  — one of those chapters of Jewish history that succeeds in telling an entire story including immigration, human drama, religion, family dynamics, communal chesed and support, the police and judicial system, and the media.

During the boom years of Jewish immigration to the United States — from the mid 1870s until 1924, when the Johnson-Reed Act curtailed further immigration — more often than not the husband/father immigrated ahead of his family. Ostensibly this was so he could establish himself financially, and once the situation stabilized he could bring them over.

Unfortunately there were husbands who — for one reason or another, Eddy enumerates tens of reasons in the exhibit — never called for their families, cut off all contact, and disappeared somewhere in the vast wilderness of the United States. This was a tragic situation for the family back home. From a halachic standpoint the abandoned woman was an agunah, and from a financial standpoint her situation was precarious.

Enter the National Desertion Bureau. The bureau was founded within the Jewish immigrant community on New York’s Lower East Side in 1905 by United Hebrew Charities, a prominent philanthropic organization. Working with Jewish community leadership in each locale, multiple Jewish national organizations, Jewish media — such as the Yiddish newspaper the Forverts which for decades ran a regular column called “Gallery of Missing Husbands”  — and other public mediums both Jewish and non-Jewish, the National Desertion Bureau functioned as both a detective agency and social services organization.

Through media, law enforcement, and of course primarily through good old Jewish contacts, the members of the Bureau attempted to locate the disappearing husbands and either bring them to justice or at least extract a get from them.

This entire story is told in a compelling, visual fashion through the well-placed exhibit that Eddy has positioned so it greets every visitor to the reading room.

How to Pronounce Kamatz

During our week in the reading room, I take occasional breaks from the folders on the table to look at some historic volumes on the surrounding shelves. When I find a couple of shelves full of original volumes of the YIVO Bleter, I pull down a volume and settle in for a longer read.

Published by YIVO over the course of the 1920s and ’30s, the Bleter was a Yiddish-language scientific journal. Essays were submitted by world-class scholars in their respective fields: linguistics, economics, demography, education, psychology, literature, and of course, history. This original series represented a high watermark for Yiddish scholarship.

Randomly opening a YIVO Bleter from 1931, I find a table of contents divided into no less than ten sections: news and updates, reports, bibliography, history, theatre, literature, economics and statistics, psychology, pedagogy and philosophy, folklore and linguistics.

While most of the contributors are at least loosely affiliated with YIVO and therefore quite secular, I notice a Yiddish grammar article in the linguistics section, entitled “Kamatz = o,” written by Dr. Solomon Birnbaum of Hamburg. This was the son of Dr. Nathan Birnbaum, legendary baal teshuvah, former Yiddishist, former Zionist (he actually coined the term Zionism), and later one of the leaders and activists of Agudas Yisrael, who formulated much of its ideological platform.

Dr. Birnbaum’s son Solomon (or Shlomo) returned to religious observance along with his father, and led a strictly Orthodox lifestyle. At the same time he was a Yiddish scholar, one of the most respected ones in the world, in fact. He lectured on the Yiddish language at the University of Hamburg until the Nazis came to power and he escaped to England.

Orthodox activist that he was, he promoted an “Orthodox Yiddish,” one that was more closely related to the spoken language of Polish chassidim, as opposed to the Lithuanian secular Yiddish promulgated by YIVO. (The debate over correct Yiddish grammar, syntax, spelling, vocabulary, and pronunciation raged on for years, and Birnbaum never gave up. In at least some sectors, he also triumphed: Birnbaum’s version of Yiddish was formally adopted by Sarah Schenirer’s Bais Yaakov movement.)

So here I discovered in the YIVO Bleter that Dr. Birnbaum directly engaged YIVO on matters of Yiddish pronunciation on their own turf. And that they welcomed him to do so and published his original work: an entire essay on how to correctly pronounce the “kamatz” sound in Yiddish.

It’s a fascinating read, from both a linguistic standpoint and a historical one. He cites Yiddish writings and inscriptions from centuries prior that would indicate how Jews pronounced words in Yiddish. Among other proofs, he includes Yiddish rhymes where one line of each couplet ends in a known Hebrew word, and the next line ends in a corresponding Yiddish word — an elegantly simple yet ingenious way to prove his argument.

Special thanks to my dear friend, collaborator and esteemed researcher Dovi Safier for arranging this trip, for hosting me while in New York and for spending the week together at YIVO.

Thank you to all of the YIVO staff who provided background, answered questions, showed us around, and assisted with materials and sources.

The following authors’ works were utilized in preparation for this article: Professor Samuel Kassow, Professor Jeffrey Veidlinger, Dr. David Fishman, and Rav Dovid Kamenetsky. 

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1068)