‘It’s a wonderland’
As YIVO turns 100, and celebrates on and offline, we look at a few of its stories
YIVO’s turning 100.
The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research had a tumultuous first half-century. Established in what was then Vilna, in Poland, and is now Vilnius, in Lithuania — note that the city has not moved, but the borders have moved around it — the Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut, or Yiddish Scientific Institute, as it was called then, was created as a center for Jewish intellectual, cultural, linguistic, everyday, and every other kind of life. It was a library, a museum, an archive, a research institute, and in every way a major big deal.
But the Holocaust, World War II, and then communism and the Cold War, the upheaval and destruction and downright demolition of Jewish life in Eastern Europe, changed YIVO as it changed every other Jewish institution there.
With many of its treasures saved by acts of individual and group heroism, including through the extraordinary exploits of the Paper Brigade, its holdings were split in three. Many of them are in Manhattan — YIVO’s headquarters are on 16th Street, in the Center for Jewish History — and there are two other troves, one in Warsaw, the other still in Vilnius.
Many of YIVO’s holdings have been digitized and are available online, Jonathan Brent, its executive director and CEO, said. “One thing that our anniversary crystalizes is that YIVO has become a global institution,” he said. “It’s not just preserving materials” — although certainly it does that, painstakingly — “but it’s also found ways of making these materials available to the world.
“In 2024, more than 700,000 people around the world used our online resources.”
The resources are significant. The archives hold about 24 million items, its curators estimate; they include recordings, art, photographs, film, and of course an ocean of documents. “We have put between 3 1/2 and 5 million pages of material online,” Dr. Brent added. “And I would say that there has never been a greater need for YIVO than there is now.”
That’s because “it is our heritage, our collective historical memory, and it’s a way of finding our position in the world. We need it because there is so much conflict within the Jewish world, particularly over Israel.
“I just got through watching a video, I think on the Huffington Post, of a professor at Columbia or Barnard talking about how in his view the tragedy is that Jews are not condemning the Israeli state. And this is a Jewish professor. Of course.
“I think that people feel a sense of disorientation and dislocation about who they are and where they are.”
For the last 80 years or so, until recently, there were guideposts for Diaspora Jews, Dr. Brent said. “There was the Holocaust. There was religion. And up until October the seventh, there was Israel, which represented the future, quote unquote.” There also was the Diaspora itself, but “the diasporic heritage was kind of lost. It wasn’t felt to be important, except for the Holocaust.
“But I think that, today, people are recovering a sense that the history and heritage and importance of the Diaspora over the thousands of years is as much an integral and constituent and ineradicable part of the Jewish world, and furthermore, that it has something to tell us.
“And if you ask me what it has to tell, I would say, very simply, that what YIVO has to tell is a story of the wholeness and the totality of Jewish experience. That’s what our story is.”
YIVO is unique, Dr. Brent continued, in that it tells the stories not only of the Eastern European Jews it was first recreated to serve, but of Jews around the world. “We have the largest collection of Ladino materials in North America; we have material in Judeo-Arabic, and we have Yemenite jewelry. We have materials from South America and from Jews in China and Japan.”
That’s all interesting and true, but it’s also abstract. The YIVO archives can be described, in theory, as a vast compendium of material. But it’s also a vast collection of stories. Everyone whose papers or jewelry or photos are in the collection was a real human being.
For example, Dr. Brent said, in passing, until he was stopped and questioned, “We have a letter signed by King Zog of Albania.”
Excuse me, Dr. Brent, but you have what?
“A letter signed by King Zog of Albania to his good friend Herman Bernstein, a prominent journalist and historian who was a friend of Teddy Roosevelt.”
Zog, who ruled Albania from 1922 to 1939, first as prime minister, then as president, then as king, then was expelled and lived the rest of his life in exile, also has a fascinating story, which is outside the scope of this one. But his intersection with Herman Bernstein is highly relevant to YIVO.
Bernstein was a Lithuanian-born Jewish American man of English words — a journalist, poet, playwright, and translator, and also a Jewish activist. He died at 58, in 1935, after having lived through what sounds like at least a century of intense experiences. According to the obituary, “In a long and adventurous newspaper career, Mr. Bernstein was noted for having published the ‘Willy-Nicky’” correspondence between the Kaiser and the Czar, for having exposed the notorious “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” as a forgery and for having sued Henry Ford for libel against the Jewish people.”
That’s just an excerpt, almost at random.
“Roosevelt eventually made Bernstein ambassador to Albania,” Dr. Brent said. “It was a small post, to a small country. But Bernstein became friends with King Zog, and their friendship developed in such a way that Bernstein had Zog’s memoir translated — probably 90 percent of it was made up — and published in English in the United States. Zog loved him so much that he declared that no Jew would ever be harmed in Albania.
“And the consequences of this were pretty striking, because not a single Jew died in Albania during World War II” — except, of course, for natural causes — “whether they were refugees in the country or had been born there.
“It is quite a wonderful story. And there’s still a warm feeling for Jews in Albania.”
The letter from Zog is part of Bernstein’s papers, and those papers are part of YIVO’s collection, Dr. Brent said.
“There are endless stories in the collection,” he continued. “There’s the story of Sholem Schwartzbard, who assassinated Symon Petliura, the head of the Ukrainian nationalists, in the aftermath of World War I. Petliura was thought to be responsible for the murders of hundreds of thousands of Jews in 1919-1920. Schwartzbard was a watchmaker, and possibly a Soviet agent. He tracked Petliura down in Paris, called out ‘Are you Symon Petliura?’ and when Petliura turned around, he shot him dead. Then he dropped his gun and declared publicly ‘I have just executed the murderer of humanity.’
“He was put on trial and found innocent.” Why? “I’m not sure, but probably the French were suffering from guilt over Dreyfus,” Dr. Brent said.
The archives also hold a letter from Thomas Mann, “written in 1945 or ’46, I believe, that never has been made public.” It’s part of the collection of I.N. Steinberg — that’s Isaac Nachman — “who was head of the Freeland League.”
Tell us more, Dr. Brent.
“This story is insane,” Dr. Brent said. “Steinberg was a practicing Jew and a socialist revolutionary. He also was a lawyer. In 1918, Lenin invites him to become minister of justice in the first Bolshevist regime. He holds that job for about a year or so and amasses an extraordinary archive of Bolshevik documents pertaining to the development of the justice system before he realizes that it isn’t going to work out.
“He goes to Lenin and he says to him, ‘You know, this is called the Ministry of Justice, but that’s actually not what I think it should be called.’ Lenin says, ‘What do you think it should be called?’ He says, ‘Well, I think it should be called the Ministry of Execution.’ And Lenin thinks about this, and he says, ‘You know, you’re right, but we can’t do that yet. It would cause too much of a fuss.’
“Steinberg was aghast, and he had good reason. He soon realized that the Bolshevik regime was going to put him in jail and probably execute him. And so he left.
“But he left with his archive, and he goes to England. It’s the runup to the war, and he becomes very concerned about the fate of the Jews in Europe, but he doesn’t think that going to Palestine is the answer. He is aware that the Jews need a homeland somewhere, and like the Zionists he is intent on developing this idea of a homeland.
“He calls it the Freeland League. He negotiates with the American government for a place for the Jews to go in Alaska. He negotiates with the Australian government for a place to go in the Kimberley in Australia. He negotiates with governments in I believe Madagascar and Tanzania and Uganda for places where the Jews can go.
“None of it pans out, but in the course of this, in the immediate aftermath of the war, before 1947, when everything was getting ever more desperate, he tries to rally international support. He gets letters from Thomas Mann, from Erich Fromm, from luminaries of all stripes, in which they articulate why the Jews need a homeland, and why it makes sense for it now to be in what is now Israel but should be somewhere else.
“That’s why we have this incredible archive. And by the way, his son became a very famous art critic. He was Leo Steinberg, who wrote the book ‘Other Criteria.’”
Those are some of the big stories — just a very few of very many, Dr. Brent said — but remember, “we have endless stories. Some are little stories, about emigration, about love affairs, about a husband running away from his wife. We have memoirs — we have the memoir of Tuvia Bielsky, one of the Bielsky brothers,” the ferocious partisan Polish Jews who fought back hard against the Nazis.
“We have stories of boxers and wrestlers. We have the story of Fania Lewando’s vegetarian cookbook.”
What’s that, Dr. Brent?
“Fania Lewando was an entrepreneur who opened a restaurant in Vilna in the 1930s,” he said. “She decided that the Jews of Eastern Europe had to learn how to cook vegetables in a way that would make them edible, so she wrote a vegetarian cookbook that was published in 1938. She gave cooking classes to women who emigrated to the United States, because she wanted them to know how to take care of their families cheaply and healthily by cooking vegetables.”
Her story did not end well — the Nazis murdered her and her husband, Lazar Lewando. But her memory survives. “We have one of two or three extant copies of the cookbook,” Dr. Brent said. “We had it translated a few years ago.” YIVO printed it, “and it was a real hit. It sold out.”
The lesson of all this is that “the stories are endless, and we are an endless people.” The ethos that was present when YIVO was founded and that has developed further throughout its first century is that “we don’t judge,” Dr. Brent said. “We don’t differentiate. Everyone has a place. We don’t say that this is more important than that. The watercarriers are as important as the great rabbis. The hoodlums and the pickpockets are every bit as important as the magnates in this civilization. If you come to YIVO and start exploring, you understand.
“It is a wonderland.”
There is so much more to say about YIVO. It welcomes the public to online programming and offers classes, exhibits, and publications, as well as intensive courses in Yiddish, which cater to everyone from novices to fluent speakers looking for even more. They’re all online at yivo.org.
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