Thanks to our JGSGM member Marian Wertalka for sharing this topic with me.
The YIVO institute for Jewish Research (YIVO) has completed the digitisation of its prewar library and archival collections.
The New York-based institute announced on Monday that it had completed the Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Online Collections Project (EBYVOC), a 7-year initiative that cost 7 million US dollars (6.18 million euros).
The aim of the project was to process, conserve and digitise YIVO’s divided prewar library and archival collections. The materials were digitally assembled in one place, on a dedicated website, becoming accessible to a worldwide audience for the first time, the institute said in a press release.
“This unparalleled collection sheds new light on the prewar Jewish history and culture across Eastern Europe and Russia, it will benefit scholars, students and the global public for generations to come,” the Lithuanian Ministry of Culture said in a press release.
The collections gives a glimpse into how Eastern European Jews lived, where they came from, how they raised and educated their families, how they created art, literature, music, and language.
The documents also describe relations between Jews and their non-Jewish neighbours, how they understood their place in the world both politically and socially and how they dealt with the turmoil and promises of modernity.
The project involved digitising approximately 4.1 million pages of books, artefacts, records, manuscripts, and documents stored in New York and Vilnius.
YIVO was founded in Vilnius in 1925. It collected Jewish folklore, memoirs, books and publications, Jewish community documents.
In 1941, the Nazis ransacked the YIVO Institute in Vilnius. Many documents were destroyed and a group of Vilnius ghetto workers were forced to sort through the collections and select materials to be shipped to Frankfurt, for use in the Nazi Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question.
In 1946, the US military recovered these documents and sent them to YIVO in New York.
Parts of the materials were hidden in Vilnius, in the Church of St. George, converted by the Soviets into the Lithuanian Book Chamber, until they were discovered in 1989.
Moreover, approximately 170,000 additional documents were discovered in the National Library of Lithuania in 2017, including rare and unpublished works.
