YIVO collecting Jewish coronavirus stories
Image by Getty Images
By Jordan Kutzik April 23, 2020
Read this article in Yiddish
Since its founding in 1925 in Vilna, Poland (now Vilnius, Lithuania) the YIVO Institute has collected personal histories from Jews so that future historians would be able to explore how world events impacted Jewish life.
Through revolutions, wars, genocides, famine and yes, epidemics, YIVO has always aimed to ensure that the Jewish people “wrote down and recorded” as Simon Dubnow, the founder of the institute’s historical section, expressed it in his final words in the Riga Ghetto.
In Dubnow’s time, historians needed to travel from shtetl to shtetl collecting old communal record books and distributing lengthy surveys that would be returned via the postal service. Now all historians need to do is create a Google form that can be filled out from the comfort of one’s own home.
Recently, the YIVO Institute began circulating a survey to find out how COVID-19 is impacting Jewish life. Among the questions: how virus-related restrictions have impacted Passover Seders, synagogue life and Jewish schools. While the survey questions are in English, responses may be submitted in any language.
For more information, visit.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rukhl Schaechter, Yiddish Editor
