News & Features

In this episode, originally broadcast on October 17, 1965, Zosa Szajkowski joins Sheftl Zak to talk about a YIVO exhibition on Yiddish orthography that was presented in conjunction with a class by Dr. Mordkhe Schaechter on the same subject. The scope of the exhibition reached as far back as the ...

List of recipients of YIVO’s 2015-2016 faculty and graduate student fellowships.

From January 5-January 23, 2015, a diverse range of students flocked to YIVO to take advantage of a rare opportunity to study the culture, history, language, and literature of East European Jews with some of the leading scholars in the field of Jewish Studies. The courses in the YIVO-Bard Winter Program on Ashkenazi Civilization (inaugurated in 2011) offer something different than the usual survey course in a university or adult education program: a chance to explore in detail fascinating aspects of this world.

Highlights of the program included:

Prof. Dr. Feliks Tych, an eminent historian and director of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, died on February 17, 2015 at the age of 85.

Feliks Tych was born in Warsaw on July 31, 1929. He grew up in Radomsko, central Poland, where his father owned a metal works.

During World War II, his parents and sibling all perished in the Treblinka death camp. Tych survived in Warsaw on false documents, living with a Polish family.

On January 21, 2015, YIVO and the Museum of the City of New York presented “Behind the Lens: New York Jews Between the Wars,” a public program in conjunction with Letters to Afar (October 22, 2014-March 31, 2015), an immersive video art installation at the Museum first premiered by YIVO at POLIN - Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw in 2013.

The four scholars on the panel used rarely seen primary source materials to explore the back-story to Letters to Afar, which features home movies of Poland in the 1920s-1930s made, for the most part, by Jews from America on trips back to their home towns.

Assemble the letterheads of Jewish organizations, institutions, and individuals in Europe, North and South America, and Palestine from the 1890s to the eve of World War II in 1939 and you have a portrait of the Jewish world: transnational; diverse in language, political, and religious orientation; and flourishing. Di gantse velt ...

A scholar talks about the YIVO autobiographies as a research resource (1965).

Dr. David E. Fishman, professor of Jewish History at The Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTS), serving as the Jacob Kronhill Visiting Scholar in East European Jewish History for the Spring 2015 semester at YIVO.

YIVO’s Board of Directors and staff mourn the passing of Solomon (Shloyme) Krystal, who died on February 2, 2015, just shy of his 103rd birthday.

Shloyme’s long and extraordinary life spanned almost the entire 20th century and a piece of the 21st. Born in Warsaw before World War I, he was the oldest of 4 children. At the end of the 1930s, he worked at the Medem Sanatorium, an educational and health retreat for children and adults at risk for tuberculosis. He survived World War II in the Soviet Union and went to Sweden in 1946, after a short time in Poland.

After he immigrated to the United States in 1952, Shloyme worked in the New York Cloak Joint Board of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. He and his sister, Hannah Fryshdorf, became involved with YIVO: Hannah as its long-time assistant director and Shloime, around 1980, as a volunteer in the YIVO Archives and a member of YIVO’s Board of Directors.

The death of Alberto Nisman, the Argentinean federal prosecutor who was investigating the terrorist attack on the AMIA building in Buenos Aires in1994, in which 85 people died and many rare and irreplaceable collections of IWO (the Argentinean branch of YIVO in existence since 1928) were destroyed, has drawn renewed ...