Jews -- Folklore

The Abraham Sutzkever-Szmerke Kaczerginski Historical Collection contains letters, manuscripts, and historical documents which were saved by the Yiddish poets Avraham Sutzkever and Szmerke Kaczerginski in the Vilna Ghetto. Sutzkever, Kaczerginski, and other members of the Paper Brigade, conscripted Jewish workers who were forced to work under the Einsatzstab Rosenberg, saved thousands of books, manuscripts and documents at great risk to their lives by hiding them in various places in the Vilna Ghetto. After the war the surviving members recovered many of the hidden items. Sutzkever sent many of these rescued materials to the YIVO Institute in New York from the period 1947 to 1956. The collection consists of 8 series and includes correspondence of writers, intellectuals, communal leaders, rabbinical figures; manuscripts of Yiddish and Hebrew writers; theater documents; folklore materials; rabbinical responsa and writings; historical and legal documents; pinkasim and Jewish communal records.

The Bina Weinreich collection consists of correspondance, memos, articles, documents pertaining YIVO publications (Max Weinreich's "History of the Yiddish Language;" the "Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry;" Nahum Stutchkoff's "Thesaurus of the Yiddish Language" and Alexander Harkavy's "Yiddish-English-Hebrew Dictionary"), Uriel Weinreich's publications "College Yiddish" and "English-Yiddish Yiddish-English Dictionary," as well as her own publications "Yiddish Folktales" and "Yidishe Folkmayses," personal papers, photographs, folklore and ethnographic materials collected by Bina Weinreich, lectures, papers given, offprints of articles, teaching material, and sound recordings from the "Dialect Project."

The collection holds original translations and clippings of Russian and Yiddish literature into German by Fega Frisch. Also included are some personal documents, such as education records and ID papers.

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.