Yiddish Resources at YIVO
The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research was founded as the Yiddish Scientific Institute in Vilna, Poland in 1925, by scholars, teachers, and other communal activists who saw the Yiddish language as the best medium for educating the Jewish population, and of giving the Jewish people access to their history and culture. The institution they developed produced ground-breaking scholarship in Yiddish and published scholarly journals, but also organized popular lectures, exhibitions, cultural evenings, and training seminars for teachers in Yiddish primary schools and high schools.
YIVO became the acknowledged authority on the Yiddish language and pioneered important linguistic research on Yiddish. The standards YIVO developed for Yiddish orthography, or spelling, and for the transliteration of Yiddish into English are today the most commonly used by publishers and scholars. YIVO's Modern English-Yiddish Yiddish-English Dictionary, first published in 1968, has now appeared in several editions.
YIVO continues to serve as the "world headquarters" of the Yiddish language. YIVO has the largest library of Yiddish books in the world and millions of Yiddish documents and other artifacts in its archives. Over 1,000 students have attended its weekly Yiddish language courses or graduated from its intensive summer Yiddish program. YIVO also holds several Yiddish-language lectures every year.
Visit Yiddishland: A lexicon of place names in Yiddish