Making it through the last century

It’s astounding to think about how many treasures are housed in the Center for Jewish History, the demure, symmetrical red-brick building in the middle of a pretty block of West 16th Street.

There are the ones that belong to YIVO, which we write about in this week’s issue. There are also the ones held by the building’s other four institutions — the American Jewish Historical Society, the American Sephardi Federation, the Leo Baeck Institute, and Yeshiva University Museum. It overflows with treasure.

It’s hard to imagine how its creators chose the objects featured in the book that’s at the center of this week’s story, “100 Objects from the Collections of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.” It’s not quite like picking your favorite children, because even the most stunningly multiparous among us hasn’t had millions of offspring and wouldn’t have to pick 100 of them. (Unless we’re, maybe, Charlotte from “Charlotte’s Web”?)

It reminded me of college admissions officers at top schools, who often say — I suspect with complete honesty — that they could have assembled an entirely different freshman class, with not one student in both, and the second class could be as impressive and promising as the first. There are just so many choices.

But when I thought about YIVO, I also thought about the antisemitism that undoubtedly is rising today, along with anti-immigrant hatred and all sorts of other dangerous undercurrents of politicized loathing.

YIVO is celebrating its centennial. It was founded in 1925, which means that it was created soon after World War I and the worldwide influenza epidemic, and just before the anti-Jew fervor endemic to eastern Europe began to roil central and western Europe as well. It has survived through what was a very bad century, particularly but not only for Jews.

Many of YIVO’s holdings document the Holocaust. Many of them were saved from the Holocaust through the nearly unimaginable bravery of the Paper Brigade, who smuggled books and other pieces of Judaica to safety, often at the cost of their own lives.

But it’s still here. The objects in it are still here. They show resilience, humor — much but not all of it black — beauty, imagination, dailiness, and hope.

And even more to the point, we’re all still here. Those of us with families who escaped Europe or other parts of the world years or decades or even a century or so earlier, or who have enriched the rest of us by choosing to become Jewish, are lucky. Those of us who survived, or whose parents and grandparents survived, also are lucky. And we’re all still here.

YIVO is, among many other things, a reminder of that resilience, hope, and luck that got us to today, and we hope will get us through today and toward a better tomorrow.

—JP