Series II: Theater Personalities, 1888 - 1940

This series contains theater programs, ephemera, and clippings, as well as personal papers, including correspondence, agreements, scrapbooks, manuscripts, and memorabilia, arranged under individual name headings. It includes larger amounts of materials related to Herz Grossbard, David Herman, Joseph Winogradoff, Rudolf Zaslavsky, Zygmunt Turkow, Jonas Turkow, Sam Ludner, Nahum Lipovski, Moyshe Lipman, Ida Kaminska, and Esther Rachel Kaminska, as well as smaller amounts of materials pertaining to some 200 other individuals.

Subseries 1, Theater Personalities, A–Z: Programs, contains theater programs that Jonas Turkow indexed and described at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York, in the late 1950s to mid 1960s, and which he subsequently organized into these 131 files according to the name of a featured performer, director, or honoree.

The remainder of the series consists of other types of ephemera as well as various groupings of personal papers that were found in unprocessed portions of the collection, and were newly examined and arranged during processing for the Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Online Collections project. Of these latter materials, smaller groupings of personal papers, as well as miscellaneous ephemera and clippings pertaining to individuals, are arranged alphabetically under name headings in Subseries 2. Theater Personalities, A-Z: Personal papers, Ephemera, Clippings.

Twelve larger groupings of personal papers form subseries 3 to 14, pertaining to the following individuals: Herz Grossbard, David Herman, Joseph Winogradoff, Rudolf Zaslavsky (with Berta Zaslavska and Leyb Getlicherman), Zygmunt Turkow, Jonas Turkow, Sam Ludner, Nahum Lipovski, Moyshe Lipman, Ida Kaminska, Esther Rachel Kaminska, and Jacob Shatzky. These subseries include materials such as correspondence, agreements, scrapbooks, and memorabilia, as well as ephemera and clippings.