YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture By Cecile Esther Kuznitz Cambridge University Press, 324 pages, $95 As it stands today, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research is the brick-and-mortar memory of East European Jewry. Photographs, letters, theater placards, diaries, institutional records, and rabbinical responsa are just some of the documents in its collection….
“YIVO is not only for the Jews,” declared Fiana Kukliansky recipient of the YIVO’s Community Service Award, at its 89th Annual Benefit held at the Center for Jewish History. Chairman of the Lithuanian Jewish Community and advisor to the Lithuanian government on Jewish matters, a feisty Kukliansky joshed: “English is not my native language, therefore…
The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research has launched a $5.25 million project to digitize a swathe of its library and archive, creating the world’s largest online collection of Eastern European Jewish life prior to the Holocaust. If completed, the Vilna Project will reunite YIVO’s pre-World War II library and archive for the first time in…
George Clooney may never have worked in the archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, a Jewish academic organization dedicated to studying and preserving the culture of east European Jewry, but his new film, Monuments Men, portrays a group of soldiers who was very much responsible for saving and securing a significant portion of…
The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research has dismissed the dean of its Max Weinreich Center for Advanced Jewish Studies and eliminated the position, according to YIVO executive director Jonathan Brent. Paul Glasser, a linguist and columnist for the Forverts who was previously in the position, ended work August 19. According to Brent, the position was…
Negotiations between Lithuania and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research may be close to re-establishing YIVO’s presence in Vilna 70 years after the Nazis looted and largely destroyed its holdings. But just where those negotiations stand appears unclear following an announcement in the group’s newsletter and a follow-up statement from YIVO’s executive director and CEO,…
It was supposed to be an evening of celebration and remembrance of the Jews of the Vilna Ghetto. But by hosting the Lithuanian foreign minister as “guest of honor” at a concert of Yiddish songs, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research has instead angered some Holocaust survivors and their advocates. Audronius Ažubalis, the foreign minister,…
He was a proud Russian, a renegade Orthodox Jew, an ardent advocate of Jewish autonomy, and the man who pioneered the field of Jewish historiography at the turn of the 20th century. Yet Simon Dubnow continues to inspire Jewish scholarship today, as evidenced by a day-long conference at the YIVO institute for Jewish Research on…
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