Telling the whole story of the Jewish people in all their diversity.
Dear Friend,
Endless stories can be found among YIVO’s 24 million artifacts and documents, including manuscripts, diaries, letters, photographs, sound and video recordings, and theater and art collections. Many of these stories are about the small, intimate details of daily life; others are about major historical events. They tell the story of many people but also of a single people, the Jewish people of Eastern Europe. They show how we lived through centuries in Eastern Europe, how we built a great civilization rich in language, the arts, and traditions, and how that civilization was destroyed during the Holocaust and yet lives on around the world through those who survived.
People come here researching broader history and wind up discovering their personal history.— Eddy Portnoy, YIVO’s Senior Academic Advisor and Director of Exhibitions
YIVO brings these stories to life for a global audience, offering free access to our digitized collections, beginners through advanced classes in Yiddish language, courses on Eastern European Jewish history and culture, and over 80 public programs every year. This year’s highlights include:
- The second exhibition of the YIVO Bruce and Francesca Cernia Slovin Online Museum explores the diary of 13-year-old Yitskhok Rudashevski, written while he was in the Vilna Ghetto. In this time of extremity and terror, Rudashevski turned to Yiddish culture for inner strength and hope. Declaring this continuity became a last, defiant act of spiritual resistance against the brutalities and hopelessness he faced in the last days before the Ghetto was liquidated. That defiance and love has transcended his death through his diary, found after the war. Through this interactive multimedia exhibition, Yitskhok’s diary will be brought to life, and users will be inspired today and for generations to come.
- Professor Abraham Hochman, a well-known psychic who lived and worked on New York City’s Lower East Side in the early 1900s, specialized in finding husbands who had abandoned their wives and families. The problem with family abandonment that Hochman dealt with later led to the founding of the National Desertion Bureau, an organization created to track down missing husbands, the subject of YIVO’s free public exhibition, Runaway Husbands, Desperate Families: The Story of the National Desertion Bureau. Nathan Goldfarb’s story is one among thousands found in their records, on display until December 1.
- The latest addition to YIVO’s Shine Online Educational Series, Is Anything Okay? The History of Jews and Comedy in America, launched in March 2024, opens up the world of Jewish humor, jokesters, wit, and iconoclasm through hundreds of unique objects in the YIVO Archives. More than 3,500 people have registered for this free, self-paced course featuring interviews and discussions with leading scholars and personalities from the world of Jewish comedy, including Alan Zweibel, one of the original writers for Saturday Night Live, and Judy Gold.
I became a writer because of what I learned at YIVO.— Dara Horn, Acclaimed author of People Love Dead Jews and Eternal Life
From pious rabbis to scoundrels, from poets and dreamers to revolutionary leaders, from ordinary men and women to industrial magnates, these stories tell the whole story of the Jewish people in all their diversity.
Join YIVO’s global community and keep these stories alive through our public programs, language and history classes, exhibitions, archival and library preservation, and new collections.
Your support will fuel new education and public programming, enriching our lives today and providing the next generation with access to the treasures and stories in the great continuum of Jewish history.
Thank you for your consideration.
!לשנה טובֿה
Happy New Year!
Best regards,
