Founded in 1925 in Vilnius, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, better known by its acronym YIVO, is an organization that preserves, studies, and teaches the cultural history of Jewish life in Eastern Europe, Germany, and Russia, as well as orthography, lexicography, and other studies related to the Yiddish or Judeo-German language.
This March 24, the institute celebrates 100 years of tireless work to preserve and share the vast cultural heritage of the Jewish people, achieving a collection of more than 24 million pieces.
Home to the world’s largest collection on Jewish life in Eastern Europe, YIVO has grown from an academic center in Vilnius, Poland (now Lithuania), to a cornerstone of Jewish memory in Manhattan.
His archive includes sacred texts but also popular jokes that reflect Yiddish culture.
For example, on the third floor of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York, an antique navigational chart of 20th-century Belarus holds an unexpected secret: on its back, a picaresque story in Yiddish.
Also on display is Theodor Herzl's leather-bound diary, in which the father of Zionism recorded his thoughts between 1881 and 1884, and the Lodz Ghetto Children's Book, which contains more than 14.000 signatures from children who lived in the ghetto during World War II; only 200 of them survived.
WITH THIS COMMENT, PROMINENT JEWISH COMMUNITIES SUCH AS THOSE IN POLAND, UKRAINE, LITHUANIA AND OTHER BALTIC COUNTRIES ARE EXCLUDED.