Additional Records of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in the Lithuanian Central State Archives

The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research was founded in Wilno (Vilna), Poland (now Vilnius, Lithuania) in 1925 as the Yiddish Scientific Institute, a center for scholarly research. YIVO began intensively collecting historical documents, artifacts, interviews on folk customs, books, and periodicals through a worldwide network of volunteer collectors and amateur ethnographers. During its time in Vilna it succeeded in amassing one of the world’s largest Jewish libraries and archives.

These collections were looted during World War II at the hands of the Einsatzstab Rosenberg, a special detail of the Nazi Party’s Office of Foreign Affairs. The Einsatzstab Rosenberg shipped off anything thought to be of value to the Institut Zur Erforschung der Judenfrage (Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question) in Frankfurt, Germany. In 1947, YIVO, by then relocated to New York, was able, with the help of the U.S. Army, to recover many of the documents and books that the Nazis had shipped to Germany.

Other documents, including those represented in this collection, were hidden in Vilna during the war by the Jews who were forced by the Nazis to sort the materials. These men and women, known as the “Paper Brigade,” risked their lives to smuggle some of the documents to hiding places in the Vilna Ghetto. After the liberation of Vilna in July 1944, some of what they had hidden was recovered and transferred to the newly founded Vilnius Jewish Museum. The materials soon needed to be rescued once again. In June 1949, the Jewish Museum was liquidated by the Soviet authorities. A Lithuanian librarian, Antanas Ulpis, head of the Lithuanian Book Chamber located in the St. George church and monastery, rescued thousands of books and documents, hiding them in the basement of the Book Chamber. For over forty years it was believed that they had been destroyed. It was only in 1988 during the period of Glasnost that YIVO learned of their existence.

These materials are now held by the Lithuanian Central State Archives (LCVA) in Fond 287. In 1994, an agreement was signed permitting the documents in this collection to temporarily be transferred to New York, where they were cataloged by YIVO archivists and conserved by preservation experts. The materials were then transferred back to Lithuania.

In 2015, YIVO and the Lithuanian Central State Archives began a joint project to digitize the documents as part of what is now entitled the Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Collections project. The original documents remain in the custody of the Lithuanian Central State Archives.