In New York, Lithuania’s president honors those who saved Jewish artifacts during and after the Holocaust
At the heart of YIVO’s collection of 25 million items are books and documents saved in the Vilna Ghetto

Jonathan Brent, executive director and CEO of YIVO, and Gitanas Nausėda, president of Lithuania, examine holdings in the Strashun Rare Books Room at YIVO’s New York headquarters, Sept. 18, 2023. The room is named for a Jewish scholar in Vilna (now Vilnius) who collected nearly 7,000 volumes of Yiddish and other books before his death in 1885. (YIVO/ Melanie Einzig)
(JTA) — The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research welcomed Lithuania’s president to its Manhattan headquarters Monday to honor the Jews who rescued rare books and documents from the Vilna Ghetto and the non-Jewish Lithuanian librarian who protected the same material from destruction by the Soviets.
Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda was the guest of honor at a small ceremony unveiling two plaques in YIVO’s Strashun Rare Book Room.
The first plaque recalls the Jewish slave laborers, led by Avrom Sutzkever and Shmerke Kaczerginski, who in 1942 and 1943 defied the Nazis’ orders and protected a trove of Jewish documents and artifacts that the Germans had intended to house in a museum dedicated to the “exterminated race.”
The second plaque honors Antanas Ulpis, then director of the Lithuanian National Book Chamber, who in 1948 hid the archival material from the Soviets, who also intended to seize and likely destroy them.
The materials saved by the Jewish “Paper Brigade” and Ulpis form the heart of YIVO’s collection of some 25,000 materials — rare books, diaries, maps, photographs and films — documenting the extent of Yiddish civilization prior and during the Holocaust.
“These acts [of rescue] are without any doubt unique examples of universal human principles to fight the evil, to fight the darkness with every bit of light,” Nausėda said in prepared remarks. “We say we must remember, we must never forget.”
Monday’s ceremony also marked a decade or more of cooperation between YIVO and Lithuania, who in the years after the war argued over the fate of the Jewish materials that remained in Lithuanian hands after YIVO was relocated to New York. Current YIVO executive director and CEO Jonathan Brent helped broker a deal in 2011 that reestablished YIVO’s presence in Vilna (now Vilnius), and in 2015, YIVO and the Lithuanian Central State Archives began a joint project to digitize the documents as part of what is now called the Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Collections project. Completed in 2022, it unites YIVO’s prewar collections online.
Blank, a telemarketing pioneer and philanthropist, attended the ceremony along with YIVO board chair Ruth Levine and other YIVO staff and supporters and Lithuanian officials.
YIVO also announced an award to be given in Ulpis’ honor to a Lithuanian who has worked to protect Jewish culture, and that the institute is working with the National Library of Lithuania and other institutions to commemorate YIVO’s 100th anniversary in 2025.
“It’s definitely a partnership,” Brent told the Jewish Telgraphic Agency after the ceremony. “It’s not one-sided. They genuinely understand, as President Nausėda indicated, that our histories are not just interconnected, but it’s part of a single history.”
This month marks the 80th anniversary of the liquidation of the Vilna Ghetto. Before Soviet troops reoccupied Lithuania in the summer of 1944, the Germans had murdered about 90% of Lithuanian Jews.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
2X match on all Passover gifts!
Most Popular
- 1
Film & TV What Gal Gadot has said about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
- 2
News A Jewish Republican and Muslim Democrat are suddenly in a tight race for a special seat in Congress
- 3
Fast Forward The NCAA men’s Final Four has 3 Jewish coaches
- 4
Culture How two Jewish names — Kohen and Mira — are dividing red and blue states
In Case You Missed It
-
Fast Forward ‘Another Jewish warrior’: Fine wins special election for U.S. House seat
-
Fast Forward A Chicagoan wanted to protest Elon Musk — and put a swastika sticker on a Jewish man’s Tesla
-
Fast Forward NY attorney general orders car wash to stop ripping off Jews with antisemitic ‘Passover special’
-
Fast Forward Cory Booker proclaims, ‘Hineni’ — I am here — 19 hours into anti-Trump Senate speech
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
Republish This Story
Please read before republishing
We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:
- Credit the Forward
- Retain our pixel
- Preserve our canonical link in Google search
- Add a noindex tag in Google search
See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.
To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.