The Vilna Collection represents fragmentary materials that were part of the original YIVO Archives in Vilna before WWII. The collection includes a wide array of materials dealing with a great variety of aspects of Jewish life in the Pre-revolutionary Russian Empire and post-revolutionary Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, and Soviet Russia. The Collection consists of personal correspondence, official correspondence with organizations and governmental institutions, financial and statistical reports, minutes of meetings of Jewish communal and political organizations, bibliographic materials, including card catalogues and bibliographies. Also included here are vital documents, such as birth certificates and birth registers, affidavits, certificates, diplomas, and travel documents. Additionally, there are petitions, resolutions, appeals, printed materials, manuscripts, lists, and questionnaires. There is a wealth of materials dealing with Jewish book trade and publishing, youth and sports organizations, education, Jewish communal life, and political activities.

The collection contains records of the Washington Committee for Soviet Jewry, a grassroots volunteer membership organization that was founded in 1968 and existed until 2001. The organization was renamed the Greater Washington Committee for Post-Soviet Jewry after the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991. The Committee worked to raise awareness of the plight of Soviet Jewry in the United States and supported Jewish communities on the U.S.S.R. territories, during the rule of the Soviet regime and after its collapse. The records cover the period from the mid-1960s through 2001, and the bulk of the collection is dated 1970s-1980s. The documents include correspondence, memoranda, publications, news clippings, photographs, slides, ephemera, audio and video recordings and 3-D objects. Originally the collection was titled Papers of Carolyn W. Sanger, *P-870 by the name of the Committee's last president.

This collection consists primarily of the research material underlying Werner Frank's genealogical work, "Legacy: the saga of a German-Jewish German family across time and circumstance" (2003, Avotaynu Foundation). It contains correspondence with distant relatives and genealogical researchers, copies of archival documents, and family trees relating to the following German-Jewish families from Baden: Frank, Regensburger, Heinsheimer, Oppenheimer, Furth, Wimpfheimer, Eppinger, Ottenheimer, Wolf (paternal) and Weingartner, Gutmann, Herz, Blum, Geismar, Auerbach, Auerbacher, Uffenheimer, Günzberger, Weil (maternal).

This collection documents the personal lives of Werner Weinberg’s immediate family and his in-laws, Hans and Rosa Halberstadt, as well Weinberg’s efforts to preserve the memory of the German Jews and the Jews of his hometown Rheda in particular as well as a limited amount of materials documenting his professional activities as a writer.

This collection consists of an estimated 320 hours of 2,000 folksongs and oral histories from 75 informants who participated in the YIVO Folksong Project directed by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (BKG) from 1973-1975, under the auspices of YIVO. This collection is a one-of-a-kind, large-scale gathering of oral histories centered around traditional Yiddish music.

Record Group 1.1, the primary collection of records from the period when YIVO was headquartered in Vilna, reflects the wide range of activities YIVO engaged in from 1925-1941. Founded as an institute for the study of Yiddish speaking Jewry, YIVO grew to become a research institute, library, archive, and graduate program in one. The collection consists primarily of administrative material such as correspondence, financial records, minutes, reports, lists, and newspaper clippings, as well as essays and publications of the Aspirantur, Division of Youth Research, and the Economic-Statistical, Psychological-Pedagogical, and Philological sections. It incorporates material generated by the Vilna office, satellite offices in Berlin, Warsaw, and New York, and by supporters and collectors throughout Poland, Europe, and indeed the world.