News & Features

August 7, 2013 marks the 88th anniversary of the establishment of YIVO. It was at this five-day conference in Berlin in 1925 that leading scholars from Western and Eastern Europe came together to craft a vision for what would become YIVO, the Yiddish Scientific Institute.

A few months later in October, supporters in Vilna (Wilno, Poland; now Vilnius, Lithuania) founded the Society of Friends of the Yiddish Scientific Institute, which became the main headquarters of YIVO. Concurrently in New York, an American branch of YIVO was established.

by ROBERTA NEWMAN This short item in the Winter 1970-71 edition of Yedies reported on a meeting of a group of YIVO Yiddish scholars with the Chief of the Terminology Section of the Department of Conference Services at the United Nations. Mordkhe Schaechter (1927-2007)was a distinguished Yiddish linguist and teacher. One of ...

by RIVKA SCHILLER In the spring of this year, I began to research in earnest one of my ancestral towns in Poland. For those who may be familiar with it, the town’s name is Chmielnik, and it is situated approximately 30 kilometers (or 19 miles) southeast of the largest neighboring city ...

In January 2013, YIVO launched the Guide to the YIVO Archives at www.yivoarchives.org. The web site, created with funding from the Kronhill Pletka Foundation, presents descriptions of over 1,800 YIVO Archives collections in a searchable, online format. Collections are indexed by subject term and country and there are detailed finding aids ...

In memory of Herbert Offen, the Offen family has donated a rare Hungarian-Hebrew document to the YIVO Archives. The Jewish community of Maros Ludas, located in Transylvania near the Maros River, had only 53 Jewish families. They could not afford to build their own synagogue and had been praying in ...

This item about YIVO's acquisition of the papers of the noted Yiddish playwright H. Leivick appeared in the July 1960 issue of Yedies: News from YIVO. See description of the Papers of H. Leivick in the Guide to the YIVO Archives. Jewish writers on the occasion of a visit by Yiddish writer ...

On May 18, 2013, an audiovisual installation, Letters to Afar, opened at the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. The installation, designed by Péter Forgács, with music by the Klezmatics, was commissioned jointly by the museum and YIVO and is based on home movies from the YIVO ...

In 1939, Yitzkhak Erlichson, a nineteen-year-old Jew, fled the German occupation of Wierzbnik, his hometown in Poland, for the Soviet Union, where he spent the next four years. His escape placed him out of the reach of the Nazis but did not spare him the ordeal of prison and labor ...

YIVO library intern Netalie Matalon, July 2013. (Photo by Roberta Newman) YIVO’s newest library intern, Netalie Matalon, a former student of Hebrew and English literature, compares her work environment to “a unique Amish quilt-making place, with a lot of updated technology -- like Google, only --YIVOOGLE. Everything here is an art. Every ...

by ROBERTA NEWMAN

Ten years after relocating to New York, YIVO held its twenty-fourth annual conference, the program for which was publicized in advance in the February 1950 issue of Yedies. The wide range of topics focused on Jewish life in the U.S. and Israel, and included presentations on Yiddish dictionaries and the experiences of Jewish children during the war. Among the keynote speakers was Yiddish writer Joseph Opatoshu.

The next issue of Yedies reported on the conference and provided highlights from the program, noting that the Saturday night opening session at Hunter College attracted an audience of 2,500.