Guide to Russian Archives Will Aid Jewish Researchers

A revolution for students of Russian Jewish life. That’s what one scholar is calling Jewish Documentary Sources in Moscow Archives: A Guide, recently published by a partnership between American and Russian institutions.

“For Jewish scholarship, the archives in the former Soviet Union are a second Cairo Genizah,” David Fishman, chairman of the department of Jewish history at the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, says, referring to the documents found 100 years ago in Egypt that transformed scholars’ understanding of medieval Jewish history and culture.

“The archives of the former Soviet Union will do the same for modern Jewish history and culture,” he says.

For seven years, Fishman and a team of scholars worked to catalog the vast archives of Russian Jewish life as part of Project Judaica — a joint academic venture of JTS, the New York-based YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, and the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow.

Project Judaica, which is headed by Fishman, was originally designed to teach archival skills and Jewish subjects to Russian archivists and design the archival guides. It now operates a five-year Jewish studies program in Russia that includes study in the West.

The book contains descriptions of thousands of archival files on Jewish history and culture, ranging from the Middle Ages to the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 — including state organizations, political parties, public institutions, newspapers, political and cultural figures.

The guide is published in Russian with an English-language index.

During the Soviet regime, the state placed strong restrictions on access to Jewish archival materials.

“For many years, we weren’t allowed even to touch the Jewish topic,” says Nina Volkova, head of the Russian State Archives on Literature and Art. “Once, censors had demanded that we drop the mention of documents of the [Moscow] State Jewish Theater from our guide.”

Since restrictions on Russian archives were loosened after the fall of communism, scholars have been faced with some new dilemmas: knowing what material is available and where it is located.

Now scholars can know that there are 22 collections containing material on the Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem in Moscow and that these can be found in five different archival repositories — and that there are 13 different archives that have material on the ritual-murder trial of Mendel Beilis, a Jew who in 1913 was accused of killing a Christian child.

The guide is an “extremely valuable tool for those interested in Russian and Eastern European Jewish history,” says Rashid Kaplanov, the academic chairman of the Moscow Center for the University Teaching of Jewish Civilization.

Surprisingly, the Jewish documents found in Moscow archives — the richest in the former Soviet Union — go far beyond topics in Russian Jewish life.

There is also material on the history of the Jews of Germany, Austria, France, and even the United States.

Some of these include the records of European Jewish organizations that were stolen by the Nazis during World War II, and then seized by the Soviet Army.

There are also prewar documents on the American Jewish Committee, the New York Yiddish daily newspapers the Forward and the Freiheit, the World Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s Paris branch.

Not all of the relevant archives could be cataloged. Even with the loosening of the restrictions in the past several years, the editors of the guide were denied permission to some major repositories, including the archives of the president of the Russian Federation, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the KGB.

The guide is the first in a series of similar guides on the archives in the former Soviet Union. Future volumes are scheduled to focus on St. Petersburg, other cities and regions within Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.