Today in Yiddishkayt… March 24
Founding of YIVO Institute for Jewish Research
On March 24, 1925, the Yidisher Visnshaftlikher Institute (Yiddish Scientific Institute)— today known as the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research – was founded in Wilno (Vilnius). Located today in New York City, YIVO remains one of the pre-eminent Yiddish research libraries, cultural institutes, and educational centers in the world. The founders of YIVO were proponents of cultural or diaspora nationalism, believing that Yiddish constituted a central aspect of the “national” culture of European Jews. YIVO’s mission has been both to study and document that culture, and to further its development.
In the period just prior to World War One, scholarship in and of Yiddish was beginning to spread. In early 1925 the Yiddish linguist Nokhem Shtif wrote a proposal entitled “On a Yiddish Academic Institute,” which he circulated among colleagues in New York, Berlin and Wilno. The Wilno group met to discuss these ideas on March 24, emphasizing the educational goals of such a project, and YIVO was born.
Between the two world wars Wilno was one of the major centers for Yiddish culture, and the development of YIVO benefited from and added to that cultural life. YIVO had several major projects: the Philological Section for the study of language, literature, and folklore; the Historical and Economic-Statistical Sections; and the Pedagogical (later the Psychological-Pedagogical)
In order to document and study a wide spectrum of Yiddish cultural life, YIVO developed a system of volunteers, each acting as a “zamler” (collector) who collected Yiddish publications, primary materials, and other data to send back to YIVO. YIVO depended on the initiative of individuals and communities who believed in furthering Yiddish culture. The Historical Section of YIVO worked in a similar way; a group of historians in Warsaw called the Jewish Young Historians Circle that joined forces with the Historical Section, led by Emanuel Ringelblum who would go on to lead the underground archive of the Warsaw Ghetto, worked with YIVO and began their own system of zamlers to document the Jewish communities of Poland.
In 1940, with Lithuanian and Soviet authorities contesting control of Wilno, the New York branch of YIVO (there were YIVO branches throughout the world) was dubbed the temporary headquarters of the organization. Max Weinreich, one of the founding members of YIVO, had been in Copenhagen when the war began and managed to reach New York and reunited with two of the other original founders, Elye Tsherikover and Jacob Lestschinsky. Much of YIVO’s original collection and its headquarters in Vilna were destroyed, but parts of the Strashun library which the Nazis had sent to Frankfurt were recovered in 1947 and sent to the New York headquarters. Weinreich became the director of research for YIVO after the war, working both to study and document the testimonies of survivors and to continue original research about American Jewish life.
