The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research has been preserving the heritage of world Jewry for 100 years. Today, it has a large archive, library, galleries and more. Its headquarters are in a beautiful brick building in New York City, but the task of something as important as preserving Jewish history hasn’t always been easy.
That’s one reason that it is celebrating its centennial anniversary with a coffee table book that highlights 100 objects drawn from the more than 24 million in its possession. Each entry is accompanied by an essay, as every object has an important story to tell.
The editor of this book is Stefanie Halpern, who serves as director of the YIVO archives. She explained how zamlers, or “collectors” in Yiddish, helped preserve the YIVO archives through the Holocaust when the Jewish people and, in turn, the relatively young organization had their future threatened.
Some of the YIVO collectors were forced by the Nazis to sort through their materials and decide what would be trashed and what would be sent to the Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question in Frankfurt. But the zamlers had other plans.
“Amongst these groups of forced laborers, there was a smaller group that decided that they were going to save these materials at all costs,” Halpern said. “Many of these individuals had been intimately affiliated with YIVO; they helped us build the organization. The materials were quite important to them; they felt that they were important to history.”
These zamlers risked their own lives for the sake of preserving the heritage of their ancestors.
“And so they smuggled materials out of the YIVO building into the Vilna ghetto and buried these materials. Two members of the paper brigade survived the war. They went into the ghetto, they dug up these materials and they actually started collecting materials again.”
Those materials found their way to New York, where the organization has been headquartered since 1940.
Now, as they celebrate 100 years of preservation, the team at YIVO hopes that this book — which has been available from YIVO since June 22 — will also serve to break down barriers between them and the general public. It has items sorted into the following categories: beliefs and customs, history, the written word, performing arts, visual arts, labor, youth, the Holocaust and its aftermath, immigration and YIVO history.
Halpern said that she has been considering this collection for a while.
“It’s something that I’ve been thinking about for a long time. We have such rich material in the archive and in the library, and the collections are so varied and so wide-ranging. It’s often intimidating to walk into an institution like ours, or just come to the reading room and use the materials,” she said. “So I wanted to use this book as an opportunity to both show the breadth of the collection and also to kind of open up and demystify the archives for the readers.”
Halpern was born and raised in Philadelphia, and she is proud to say that the book has its own connection to the city. One of the artifacts is a handbill that advertises a Yiddish play being presented at the historic Arch Street Theatre, which Halpern said was, at the time, the second-oldest theater in the country. It was demolished in 1936, but for one night in 1932, it presented an acclaimed production of “Hirsh Lekert,” complete with a New York cast and ensemble.
The play is emblematic of Yiddish dramatic entertainment in many ways, writes Joel Berkowitz, who said in his essay that “conflicts between ordinary folk and those with greater power and wealth had long figured prominently in Yiddish drama.”
So, for an organization that holds archives with millions of items, how exactly do you decide what to put into a list of 100?
First, the team at YIVO listed as many objects that they could think of that had some sort of noteworthy story or “interesting provenance,” said Halpern. That list was a couple of hundred items long.
“Then, we sat down and looked at them and saw the natural patterns that emerged in terms of the thematic areas, and then within that we placed these things … and then really had to narrow down,” she said.
The group also worked to eliminate objects that didn’t bring as much of a story as others. They also had to account for what items would garner good essays. In total, 57 scholars authored an entry.
Halpern said that the first 75 items were easy to identify. The hardest part was the last two dozen or so.
Halpern was quick to credit the team behind this effort, as no one editor could have done it alone.
