Established 1925 (1925) Founder Max Weinreich Director Jonathan Brent | Website YIVO Founded 1925, Vilnius, Lithuania | |
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Public transit access Subway: 14th Street–Union Square Headquarters New York City, New York, United States Location 15 West 16th Street, Manhattan, New York, United States Similar Center for Jewish History, Yiddish Book Center, JewishGen, Workmen's Circle, Yeshiva University Museum Profiles | ||
Yivo liberalism and the jewish response to fascism
YIVO (Yiddish: ייִוואָ, [jiˈvɔ]), established in 1925 in Wilno in the Second Polish Republic (now Vilnius, Lithuania) as the Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut (Yiddish: ייִדישער װיסנשאַפֿטלעכער אינסטיטוט, [ˈjidiʃɛr ˈvisən.ʃaftlɛxɛr instiˈtut], Yiddish Scientific Institute), is an organization that preserves, studies, and teaches the cultural history of Jewish life throughout Eastern Europe, Germany and Russia, as well as orthography, lexicography, and other studies related to Yiddish. (The word yidisher means both "Yiddish" and "Jewish".) The English name of the organization was changed to the Institute for Jewish Research subsequent to its relocation to New York City, although it is still primarily known by its Yiddish acronym. YIVO is now a member of the Center for Jewish History.
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Theo bikel s final farewell at the yivo institute
Activities
YIVO preserves manuscripts, rare books, and diaries, and other Yiddish sources. The YIVO Library in New York contains over 385,000 volumes dating from as early as the 16th century. The YIVO archives holds over 24,000,000 documents, photographs, recordings, posters, films, and other artifacts. Together, they comprise the world's largest collection of materials related to the history and culture of Central and East European Jewry and the American Jewish immigrant experience. The archives and library collections Include works in twelve major languages, including English, French, German, Hebrew, Russian, Polish, and Judaeo-Spanish.
YIVO also functions as a publisher of Yiddish-language books and of periodicals including YIVO Bleter (founded 1931), Yedies Fun YIVO (founded 1929), and Yidishe Shprakh (founded 1941). It is also responsible for English-language publications such as the YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Studies (founded 1946).
History
YIVO was initially proposed by Yiddish linguist and writer Nochum Shtif (1879–1933). He characterized his advocacy of Yiddish as "realistic" Zionism, contrasted to the "visionary" Hebraists and the "self-hating" assimilationists who adopted Russian or Polish. Other key founders included philologist and theater director Max Weinreich (1894–1969) and historian Elias Tcherikower (1881–1943).
YIVO was founded at a Berlin conference in 1925, but headquartered in Wilno, a city with a large Jewish population that had been annexed to Eastern Poland in 1922. The early YIVO also had branches in Berlin, Warsaw and New York City. Over the next decade, smaller groups arose in many of the other countries with Ashkenazi populations.
In YIVO's first decades, Tcherikover headed the historical research section, which also included Simon Dubnow, Saul M. Ginsburg, Abraham Menes, and Jacob Shatzky. Leibush Lehrer (1887–1964) headed a section including psychologists and educators Abraham Golomb, H. S. Kasdan, and Abraham Aaron Roback. Jacob Lestschinsky (1876–1966) headed a section of economists and demographers Ben-Adir, Liebmann Hersch, and Moshe Shalit. Weinreich's language and literature section included Judah Leib Cahan, Alexander Harkavy, Judah A. Joffe, Zelig Kalmanovich, Shmuel Niger, Noach Pryłucki, and Zalman Reisen. YIVO also collected and preserved ethnographic materials under the direction of its Ethnographic Committee. In 1925, YIVO's honorary board of trustees or "Curatorium" consisted of Simon Dubnow, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Moses Gaster, Edward Sapir and Chaim Zhitlowsky.
From 1934–1940, YIVO operated a graduate training program known as the Aspirantur. Named after Zemach Shabad, YIVO’s chairman, the program held classes and guided students in conducting original research in the field of Jewish studies. Many of the students' projects were sociological in nature (reflecting the involvement of Max Weinreich) and gathered information on contemporary Jewish life in the Vilna region.
The Nazi advance into Eastern Europe caused YIVO to move its operations to New York City. A second important center, known as the Fundacion IWO, was established in Buenos Aires, Argentina. All four directors of YIVO's research sections were already in the Americas when the war broke out or were able to make their way there. For their own reasons, the Nazis carried the bulk of YIVO's archives to Berlin, where the papers survived the war intact, and were eventually moved to YIVO in New York City.
The Chicago YIVO Society is a third active center today.
Publications
YIVO has undertaken many major scholarly publication projects, the most recent being The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, published in March 2008 in cooperation with Yale University Press. Under the leadership of editor-in-chief Gershon David Hundert, professor of history and of Jewish Studies at McGill University in Montreal, this unprecedented reference work systematically represents the history and culture of Eastern European Jews from their first settlement in the region to the present day. More than 1,800 alphabetical entries encompass a vast range of topics including religion, folklore, politics, art, music, theater, language and literature, places, organizations, intellectual movements, and important figures. The two-volume set also features more than 1,000 illustrations and 55 maps. With original contributions from an international team of 450 distinguished scholars, the encyclopedia covers the region between Germany and the Ural Mountains, from which more than 2.5 million Jews emigrated to the United States between 1870 and 1920.
The first complete English-language edition of Max Weinreich's classic book History of the Yiddish Language, edited by Dr. Paul (Hershl) Glasser, was published in two volumes in 2008.