The National Yiddish Book Center of Amherst, Mass, will be moving the 250,000 Yiddish books it has rescued from all over North America in the past four years into a new and spacious haven next week.
The new headquarters for the Yiddish books is a renovated old paper mill in Holyoke, Mass., with 17,000 square feet of fire-protected space. The Center is currently seeking to raise $75,000 to enable volunteers to move the books, and install lighting and humidity controls, and steel library shelving in their new home.
The books, all but 25,000 of which are still in the boxes they were mailed or carried in originally, have been temporarily stored for the past two years in a warehouse near Amherst, the lease on which expires in June. Every week 2,000 additional books, many of them rare, continue to arrive there.
PROJECT BEGAN SEVERAL YEARS AGO
The project began when Aaron Lansky, the Center’s founder and executive director, was a graduate student of Yiddish Literature at McGill University in Montreal, in 1978-79. “We had no books to use–most were out of print,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “We went to Jewish neighborhoods, ringing doorbells, asking to borrow books.”
“Meanwhile,” he continued, “it was becoming obvious that Yiddish books were being thrown out or routinely destroyed, for example, when Jews moved out of old neighborhoods. We were at a point of transition: the grandparent generation was dying, and the grandchildren were abandoning their books. We realized that if nothing was done, within a few years the books would all be lost.”
Lansky started to collect old Yiddish books. They “inundated” his parents’ apartment in New Bedford, Mass, to a point where the floors began to sag under their weight. In 1979, he and several other young Jews in their 20’s decided to move the operation to the Amherst area, which Lansky knew as an artistic and literary center, having been an undergraduate student at Hampshire College.
After acquiring a factory loft in Northampton, and the cooperation of five colleges in the area, Lansky mailed out an announcement to all the Jewish papers in North America. It read: “Send books.”
THOUSANDS OF YIDDISH BOOKS SENT
Within weeks, he said, “thousands of Yiddish books came in. It was a deluge. One day I remember, 125 boxes arrived. It became a big problem with the post office!” The Center was offered a school building in Amherst rent-free. Within two years, that, too, was overflowing with books.
“Our original idea was that books would come to us,” Lansky told the JTA. “We soon realized it could not work entirely that way — too many people were old and unable to send them.” The Center then set up a system of 200 “zamlers” — volunteers who travel around their areas of North America collecting books — from abandoned buildings in the South Bronx to garages in Beverly Hills.
“We put our energy into collecting because the books were in danger of being destroyed” just at a point when interest was growing in Yiddish culture, Lansky said. The Center’s goal is to “get the books back into circulation — to match old books with new readers.”
The Center has already put many of the books it has collected into libraries in 20 countries, including Japan and Scandinavia, and into the hands of individuals, who learn of the available books through a catalogue published by the Center. The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the Library of Congress each get a copy of every book not already in their library.
POSSIBLE RARE AND PRECIOUS VOLUMES
Once the Center moves into its new headquarters, “we will finally be able to unpack and shelve all of our quarter of a million books,” Lansky said. “Some have not been opened in decades. There may be rare and precious volumes among them.” He looks forward to the discoveries the Center’s volunteers will be making. “It’s a real treasure trove,” he said. “One thousand years of Jewish history and culture is tied up in these books.”
Lansky said that anyone interest in helping the project can do so by writing to the National Yiddish Book Center, P.O. Box 969, Old East Street School, Amherst, Mass. 01004.
Help ensure Jewish news remains accessible to all. Your donation to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency powers the trusted journalism that has connected Jewish communities worldwide for more than 100 years. With your help, JTA can continue to deliver vital news and insights. Donate today.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
