On the third day of unpacking the “attic” of Eastern European Jewry, archivists at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research were still finding surprises.
They found a letter from Albert Einstein, a poster for what might have been the Vilna premiere of “The Dybbuk” in 1921, an invitation to the Lubavitcher rebbe’s wedding and a pink 1937 ticket to the women’s section of the Vilna Great Synagogue.
And that was just in the first six of the 35 boxes of YIVO’s original archives that arrived here last week from what is nor Vilnius, Lithuania.
The crates are crammed with letters, minutes, student newspapers, children’s notebooks, photographs and posters documenting Jewish life and culture in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. All told, the trove contains at least 50,000 pieces of paper.
“These are all mirrors of a vanished world,” said Alan Nadler, YIVO’s director of research.
When the Germans occupied Vilna in 1941, they shipped most of the YIVO archives to Frankfurt. These made their way to New York after the war, where they became the core of YIVO’s current holdings.
But the archives that remained in Vilna, where YIVO had been founded in 1925, disappeared for the duration of the Cold War.
They were discovered three years ago, crumpled into crates piled in the basement of a Catholic church confiscated by the Lithuanian Central State Archives.
Now, every page has been flattened, placed in an envelope, numbered in pencil and stamped in red with the Lithuanian archive’s seal.
But the Lithuanians regarded the documents as national treasures and refused to return them to YIVO. After years of negotiations, the Lithuanian archive permitted the shipment here of 35 boxes out of a total of 200. But the archive is demanding that these be returned before more are shipped.
“We are still negotiating,” Nadler said.
Every envelope reveals a cross section of Eastern European Jewish life and “shows the breadth of the world that they inhabited,” Nadler said.
As YIVO Associate Archivist Fuma Mohrer carefully leafs page by page through the contents of an envelope, she jumps back and forth in time. What she finds is: – A Yiddish flyer urging aid to orphans from World War I. – Handwritten scraps, apparently recording arrests in the Vilna ghetto after the Nazi occupation in 1941. – Minutes from a YIVO board meeting. – Eight pages from a mimeographed school newspaper, with Hebrew articles heralding the imminent founding of The Hebrew University in Jerusalem and making fun of the faculty in the purim spirit (“We apologize if, God forbid, we offend anyone). There is also a Yiddish article on how to start a newspaper. – A page from a pre- Passover sermon.
And many pages — some handwritten, some printed, some mimeographed — whose meaning and significance will only be revealed after careful examination and research.
The task of properly sorting, cataloging and microfilming these 35 boxes is expected to take a year. YIVO plans to exhibit selections from the archives.
“This will considerably enrich our knowledge of the history of the time,” Mohrer said.
She points to three large pages, copies of a form that recorded the contributions made by tens of thousands of Jews toward a new Torah scroll after the death of Rabbi Israel Meir HaCohen, the beloved Chofetz Chaim, in 1933.
Each page records which letters in the scroll the inhabitants of a specific shtetl purchased.
“We already have lots of these,” said Mohrer. “But if you take all of them, you have a great portrait of a certain strata of Jewish life.”
Early on, Nadler found an eyewitness account of the 1919 pogrom in the Ukrainian town of Uman-Doubava, recording the names of the 187 people killed. First among them was the shtetl’s octogenarian rabbi, the father of the famed Hebrew writer Micha Josef Berdyczewski.
Nadler holds up another document. “This is a handwritten eyewitness account of a pogrom in Rasova. Do you know where Rasova is? I haven’t idea,” he said.
Among the papers are materials that the Vilna YIVO collected from overseas. From Palestine, a bright Hebrew poster urges Jews to eat “Hebrew watermelon.” From New York, a 1914 Yiddish flyer announces a general membership meeting for the Hebrew Bakers Union Local 100.
Despite the “chaos and shambles” of the archives today, as Nadler put it, the papers reflected the work of a decade-and-a-half of determined research before the onslaught of the Holocaust.
A network of amateur “collectors” scoured through the Eastern European countryside, finding records and information from vanishing shtetls.
“What motivated these people was sense Jewish life was changing,” said Nadler. “Folklore was vanishing, dialects, especially in the hinterlands [were also disappearing]. Jews were undergoing a very rapid urbanization and life in shtetls and farms was disappearing.”
“It was also their own leave-taking that was involved,” added Mohrer. It was “not just because that world was disappearing but because they were leaving it.”
If anything, this commitment to preserving the past only strengthened during the war.
Rachela Melezin worked during the Holocaust in the YIVO building in Vilna, sorting out the YIVO and other Jewish materials for the Nazis.
As some documents were shipped off to form the basis of a Nazi institute in Frankfurt, Melezin and her colleagues tried to save what they could, smuggling papers back home at night into the ghetto, hiding them underground.
“We thought we could do something for the future,” said Melezin, who now lives in Teaneck, N.J.
Melezin risked her life to save manuscripts because, she said, “I didn’t believe at that time that my head belonged to me.”
Zelig Kalmanovitch, who had edited the YIVO journal before working with Melezin in sorting books for the Nazis, used to reassure her.
“Kalmanovitch always said, `Don’t worry, after the war you’ll get everything back,'” she recalled.
In 1943, the ghetto was liquidated and the YIVO building was closed.
Only 5 percent of Lithuanian Jewry survived the war.
Because of that fate, the many materials from children and schools take on a particularly poignant air.
There is a geometry notebook, with Yiddish notes underneath a graph of 4x+2y=33 and 3x+5y=20. Penciled sketches of Bunsen burners illustrate science notes. A child’s stick-figure coloring of “my tottie” (my father) lies alongside a latke recipe.
A letter from New York to someone in Vilna, dated Oct. 21, 1940, stated: “Conditions with regard to procuring visas have not changed.”
Yet despite the destruction, Nadler noted that the continuity between the YIVO archives of half a century ago and the organization’s work today.
He found a hand-drawn certificate presented to Tsemakh Shabad on his 60th birthday. Shabad was a founder of YIVO, an active member of the Central Yiddish School Organization and a member of the Polish Senate.
A year ago, YIVO marked what would been his 130th birthday with a one-day conference in New York.
The boxes also contained a booklet of stamps with Yiddish and Polish lettering and a bold, art deco design. The stamps were to promote YIVO’s building fund for its Vilna building.
“The amazing thing,” said Nadler, “is that the same day this stuff arrived, we closed the purchase of our new building.”
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