YIVO
The (Yiddish der ) Yidisher visnshaftlekher institut ( Yiddish ייִדישער װיסנשאַפֿטלעכער אינסטיטוט, Acronym: YIVO /ייִוואָ, English YIVO Institute for Jewish Research , formerly Yiddish Scientific Institute , German " Jüdisches or Jiddisches Wissenschaftliches Institut" -ייִדיש yidish means both “Jewish” and “Yiddish”) is an institute for research into the cultural history of Eastern European Judaism and Jewish emigration to America. It is now headquartered in New York City and is a member of the Center for Jewish History .
present
The YIVO houses a library with over 386,000 volumes. Its archive includes over 24 million manuscripts, old prints, photographs, sound recordings, films and posters. It has the world's largest collection on the history and culture of Central and Eastern European Judaism and Jewish immigration to the United States.
The YIVO also publishes publications on the Yiddish language, culture and history, more recently the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe (2008).
history
The YIVO was founded in 1925 at a conference in Berlin and - against the opposition of a majority of the founders who would have wanted to set up the institute in a large center - was set up in Vilnius, Poland, as an academic institution for studying Eastern Jewish and Yiddish culture and economy. Among the founders were the philologist Max Weinreich (1894-1969), the historian Elias Tcherikower (1881-1943) and the linguist and author Nochum Shtif (1879-1933).
Through its work on Jewish history, Yiddish literature , Yiddish philology and Jewish ethnography, the YIVO became a center of Jewish science and, among other things, with its orthography established in 1937, it became an authority in the field of the Yiddish language. In addition to the founders already mentioned, the employees included Simon Dubnow , Saul M. Ginsburg , Alexander Harkavy , Judah A. Joffe , Zelig Kalmanovich , Jakob Lestschinsky , Yudel Mark , Samuel Niger , Noah Pryłucki , Salman Reisen , Jacob Robinson and Uriel Weinreich . The periodicals YIVO Bleter (founded 1931), Yedies fun YIVO (1929) and Yidishe Sprakh (1941) were published at YIVO . In the 1990s, YIVO material hidden by librarians during the Soviet era was brought from Vilnius to New York.
The original headquarters of the institute was in Vilnius, Poland, with branches in Berlin , Warsaw and New York City . In 1940, after the beginning of the Second World War, the headquarters were relocated to New York before the Nazis looted the institute in Vilnius in 1941. The branch office in Buenos Aires , the Fundación IWO, still exists today.
Shortly before the outbreak of war, the historian Lucy Dawidowicz visited the YIVO in Vilnius and later published memoirs about it.
literature
- Verena Dohrn (Ed.): "Science of Eastern Judaism". Lectures given in the Lower Saxony State Library on the occasion of the opening of the exhibition on the 75th anniversary of the YIVO Institute . Niemeyer, Hameln 2003, ISBN 978-3-8271-8604-1 .
- David E. Fishman: "Torn from the Fire: Saving Jewish Cultural Treasures in Vilnius." Yiddish and German text. Laurentius, Hannover 1998, ISBN 978-3-931-61497-3
- Elisabeth Gallas : “The morgue of books.” Cultural restitution and Jewish historical thinking after 1945. V&R, Göttingen 2013 (on the relocation of the goods to the USA, passim). (Review by Jürgen Lillteicher)
- Samuel D. Kassow : YIVO. In: Dan Diner (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture (EJGK). Volume 6: Ta-Z. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2015, ISBN 978-3-476-02506-7 , pp. 479-485.
- Cecile Esther Kuznitz: YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture: Scholarship for the Yiddish Nation. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2014, ISBN 978-1-107-01420-6 (print); ISBN 978-1-139-86498-5 (eBook). [Table of contents: http://scans.hebis.de/HEBCGI/show.pl?33511990_toc.pdf ]
Web links
- YIVO website in New York
- Internet site of the YIVO in Buenos Aires
- This Month in Holocaust History - April 1943. In: yadvashem.org . Archived from the original on November 10, 2016 .
- Carsten Dippel: Jewish cultural heritage - is the Yiddish library YIVO abolishing itself? In: Deutschlandfunk-Kultur broadcast “From the Jewish World”. March 6, 2020 (also as mp3 audio , 7.7 MB, 8:24 minutes).
Individual evidence
- ↑ Printed in two volumes and online.
- ↑ Jürgen Lillteicher: Review of: E. Gallas: "The morgue of books". Cultural restitution and Jewish historical thinking after 1945. Göttingen 2013. In: H-Soz-Kult . March 31, 2014, accessed March 8, 2020 .