The materials in this collection constitute a semi-random sample of the pre-war archive that was transferred to the Central State Archives of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic following the liquidation of the Vilnius Jewish Museum in 1949. The collection includes records of YIVO work and activities, financial records, correspondence, and publications; documents about pogroms in Ukraine, and Red Army and Soviet activity in Vilna and Bialystok; and a significant amount of records of socialist, communist, and Zionist political parties, as well as associated newspapers and one-time publications.

The collection contains papers of a pioneer activist of the American Soviet Jewry Movement Rabbi David Hill. A New York City Rabbi and businessman Rabbi Hill served as the national president of National Council of Young Israel, member of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and an officer of National Conference on Soviet Jewry. Starting 1971 he ran Operation Lifeline, an independently funded outreach program created by NCSJ Commission on Education and Culture to support Jewish life in the USSR and Former Soviet Union. David H. Hill Papers include materials from late 1950s to 2000 and the bulk of the collection represents the time period from 1963 to 1990. The documents include correspondence, memoranda, publications, news clippings, photographs with negatives, ephemera and a poster.

This collection documents the life of Isaac Zelig Zieman (1920-2007). Born into an Orthodox family in Riga, Zieman managed to escape Latvia in 1941 and spent much of the war in the Soviet Union. In Germany from 1945-1956, he worked with displaced persons and studied psychology, after which he emigrated to the United States. In New York City, he dedicated the remainder of his life to facilitating dialogue between groups with historical enmities. The bulk of the material relates to this work, from the 1970s-2000s, as a lecturer and group therapist focused on peace and understanding between groups such as Germans and Americans, blacks and whites, and Israelis and Palestinians. The collection also includes materials from Zieman's immediate post-war experience in Germany working with displaced persons and as a student in Munich.

Dr. Martha Lev-Zion (1940-2014) was a genealogist and a historian at the Ben Gurion University in Be’er Sheva, Israel. This collection contains materials relating to her genealogy research, including family trees, genealogical tables, maps, photographs, family narratives, newsletters, correspondence, and vital records regarding her family.

This collection consists of photographs and negatives of World ORT conferences and congresses, various individuals connected with ORT, and ORT vocational programs and activities, including in Displaced Person’s camps, in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Cuba, and North and South America.

The Records of the YIVO Ethnographic Committee is a sub-group of Record Group 1, Records of YIVO - Vilna. The activities of the Ethnographic Committee consisted of collecting folklore materials, preparing and analyzing folklore questionnaires, corresponding with folklore collectors throughout the world, and maintaining a museum. This collection also includes surviving fragments of the collections of the S. Ansky Jewish Historical and Ethnographic Society which was active in Vilna from 1920 until 1940, and of Invayskult, also known as the Jewish Bureau of the Belorussian Academy of Science in Minsk (founded in 1925 and dissolved in the 1930s). Record Group 1.2 includes both administrative files of the aforementioned institutions and folklore and historical materials, which were gathered in these institutions' archives.