by JOSEPH BERGER, The New York Times, published Oct. 2, 2014
 |
Jonathan
Brent, the executive director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish
Research, in the institute's archives in Manhattan. Credit: Michael
Appleton for The New York Times
|
Like
a family split apart by the upheaval of war, what is now known as the
YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, considered the world's foremost
collection of Yiddish books and cultural artifacts, was torn apart as a
result of the German occupation of Vilna, Lithuania, in 1941 and the
Nazis' plan for studying a people they determined would be extinct.
Much
of the prewar collection was soon turned to pulp. But a large part was
shipped to Frankfurt for an anti-Semitic institute for "the study of the
Jewish question."
The
American Army recovered that material and sent it to YIVO's new home in
New York. Still, much of the collection remained in Vilna, now Vilnius,
where in a gripping saga it was rescued during the war by enslaved
Jewish laborers who risked their lives to squirrel away precious books,
diaries, paintings and sculptures in underground bunkers, attics and
crannies.
Now, 70 years later, YIVO has announced a $5.25 million project to reunite the scholarly treasures, digitally.
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A Nazi stamp in a book in YIVO's collection. Credit: Michael Appleton for The New York Times
|
The
Lithuanian government did not want to surrender what it considers part
of its national heritage, but it has agreed to assist in having all
250,000 pages of documents and 4,200 books digitally copied and
integrated into a web portal, where they will be available to scholars
around the world. The YIVO collection at 15 West 16th Street in
Manhattan - an archive of 24 million items that includes the immigrant
Jewish experience in America as well as the almost vanished Jewish
culture of Eastern Europe - will also be digitized. The project is
expected to take seven years.
"These
materials are Holocaust survivors," said David E. Fishman, a professor
of Jewish history at the Jewish Theological Seminary who is working on a
chronicle of the YIVO collection's rescue. "Like a survivor, these
materials were controlled by the Germans. Like a survivor, they were in
hiding. The fact that they were saved is miraculous."
Vilna
was known as "the Jerusalem of Lithuania" for both its intellectual and
religious eminence, though members of a nationwide community that once
numbered over 200,000 Jews - half in Vilna - sometimes speak of it as if
it were the Jerusalem of all of Europe. Indeed, YIVO (an acronym in
Yiddish for Yiddish Scientific Institute), which was started in 1925 to
foster consciousness of the rich 800-year-old history of Eastern
European Jews, housed materials from across the continent.
Among
the materials that will be made available are many that offer a flavor
of how Jews lived: Yiddish theater posters; student geometry notebooks
from a Yiddish school, complete with rough sketches; records of
synagogues, rabbinical schools, charities, fraternal and professional
associations and Zionist movements; early editions of Hebrew books, some
dating from the 1500s; the original script of Jacob Gordin's "Mirele
Efros," a classic of Yiddish theater sometimes known as the "Jewish
Queen Lear"; missing script pages from another dramatic classic, "The
Dybbuk," by S. Ansky, in the author's own hand; and two etchings by Marc
Chagall.
Some
of the materials had been hidden, crumpled into balls and covered with
earth. Those will now have to be flattened, cleaned and paired up with
their missing pages.
"This is cultural paleontology," said Jonathan Brent, YIVO's executive director.
Arranging
the project involved a delicate diplomatic minuet and included meetings
in Vilna with Mr. Brent, government officials and leaders of the Jewish
community, which now numbers 5,000.
 |
Items in 1947 after their rescue; some remained in Lithuania.
Credit: YIVO Archives |
Mr.
Brent wanted Lithuania to send the materials to New York, since it felt
YIVO was the owner. But when Lithuania balked, he said: "I proposed to
Lithuania that we hold moot the question of ownership. Our job is to
preserve materials for future generations and make them available to
scholars worldwide who can make sense of these materials. We're able to
create an electronic bridge over a troubled stream."
Ultimately
the Lithuanian Central State Archives, with a fund of 200,000 euros
(about $250,000), will assign four employees to describe, restore and
digitize the documents. YIVO will pay an additional two employees (it
already has pledges of $375,000 for the project). YIVO archivists will
make periodic trips to Vilna to supervise the cataloging and
digitization, which will take place at the Lithuanian Central State
Archives and the Lithuanian National Library.
"The
Litvaks' culture and history constitute an integral part of Lithuania's
culture and history, so we are interested to preserve these documents
because they are part of our heritage," Mantvydas Bekesius, a vice
minister in Lithuania's foreign affairs ministry, said in an email,
using a term for Lithuanian Jews.
The
Lithuanians, perhaps eager to cement their image as an enlightened
democracy in the wake of the Soviet Union's breakup, have been
extraordinarily cooperative, Mr. Brent said.
The
breakup of the collection started with the German invasion of the
Soviet Union. The Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg and his subordinates
rounded up Judaica collections for their so-called research institutes,
but they needed people who could expertly analyze Yiddish works and so
forcibly drafted intellectuals like the Yiddish poets Abraham Sutzkever
and Shmerke Kaczerginski to sift through the material and pack it. Just
as the Jews were selected for deportation to concentration camps, books
and documents were selected for shipment to paper mills.
But
over several years Sutzkever, Kaczerginski and others stuffed thousands
of books and documents - including works from another important Jewish
collection, the Strashun Library - inside their clothing and smuggled
them into the Nazi-demarcated Jewish ghetto. There, they were hidden
behind apartment walls, beneath floors and in a ventilated bunker 60
feet underground that had been constructed by an engineer for his
paralyzed mother. After Vilna was liberated by the Soviets in July 1944,
those workers who had not been killed at the Ponar mass murder site
unearthed the hidden papers.
But
they had to rescue them all over again because the Soviets under
Stalin, trying to wipe out any ethnic chauvinism, started to destroy the
collection. Some items were smuggled to New York, and some were hidden
in the basement of a Catholic church by a gentile librarian, Antanas
Ulpis.
Starting
in 1989, about two-thirds of the surviving collection in Vilna was
shipped in crates to New York for copying and then returned. But that
was the age of Xeroxes and microfilms, which are not permanent and
cannot be easily disseminated worldwide, and the new project will
include the material that was not sent over then.
Worldwide
access, Mr. Brent said, is the beauty of digitization, something the
scholars who assembled YIVO decades ago could never have imagined.
A
version of this article appears in print on October 3, 2014, on page
A23 of the New York edition with the headline: Split Up by Holocaust,
Top Collection of Yiddish Works Will Be Reunited Digitally.
YIVO Institute for Jewish Research | 15 West 16th Street
New York | NY | 10011
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