Collection on Jewish Customs

The Collection on Jewish Customs is a composite collection of materials from the YIVO Archives in Vilna relating to Jewish customs and practices in Europe between the 1830s and 1930s. The collection consists of documents, artifacts, printed material, correspondence, and photographs.

Series I relates to the Jewish life cycle: birth, bris milah, bar mitsvah, marriage, divorce, death and mourning. Materials include birth announcements, invitations to weddings and bar mitsvahs, ketubahs, getn, wills, death notices and eulogies, and gravestone inscriptions. The getn, partiularly those issued by Menachem Mendel Zak, Chief Rabbi of Riga from 1913 until his death in the Holocaust, comprise a significant portion of the collection as a whole. Also present is rabbinic correspondence investigating husbands who abandoned their wives, and chalitzah documents, contracts signed by the brother of a groom agreeing to perform the chalitzah ceremony in the case of the groom's death.

Holiday and Sabbath materials, including printed announcements, holiday-specific songs, prayers, and blessings, and guides to holiday and Sabbath related halakhot, can be found in Series II. Series III topics have to do with everyday Jewish customs, practices, and beliefs, such as daily prayers, amulets, mezuzahs, kosher slaughtering, ritual immersion, and circumcision.

Series IV items are related to Rabbis, some more directly than others. They consist of newspaper clippings, correspondence, generic letters, and cards. The copied manuscript pages of Ohr Samayach and Meshech Chochma, contained in folder 55, may have the same provenance as the getn and other documents of Menachem Mendel Zak in Series I, as Zak published Meshech Chochma following the death of Meir Simcha of Dvinsk.

Series V contains objects, decorative items, and visually significant materials, including New Year’s cards and postcards depicting scenes from Jewish life, calendars, mazalot, and photographs of Judaica.