Łódź (Poland)

This collection contains various materials related to the Łódź Ghetto which were originally part of the Bund Archives. Materials include memoirs and eyewitness accounts, materials created by the German occupiers, notices from the ghetto administration, documents originating with resistance groups, photographs, post-war articles and newspaper clippings about the Łódź Ghetto, internal ghetto correspondence, and various ephemera items, such as an armband, ghetto money and various work permits.

The collection contains play manuscripts, programs, playbills, posters, photographs, correspondence, agreements, scrapbooks, clippings, printed ephemera, and memorabilia relating to Yiddish theater primarily in the early twentieth century, especially the interwar period. Also included are items of printed ephemera related to Yiddish film, Hebrew theater, and a broad range of Jewish performers, including cantors, singers and dancers. Geographically, the materials originate predominantly in Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe, including parts of the Russian Empire and, later, the Soviet Union; and, to a lesser extent, the United States, especially New York City. Also included are materials from Western Europe, Palestine (Eretz Israel), South America, and other regions around the world. Among the theater personalities represented in the collection with significant amounts of material are Herz Grossbard, David Herman, Joseph Winogradoff, Rudolf Zaslavsky, Zygmunt Turkow, Jonas Turkow, Moyshe Lipman, Ida Kaminska, and Esther Rachel Kaminska. The theater groups best represented include the Varshever Yidisher Kunst-Teater (VYKT; Warsaw Yiddish Art Theater), founded by Zygmunt Turkow and Ida Kaminska; the Vilna Troupe; Yung Teater / Nay Teater (Warsaw; Vilna), under the direction of Michael Weichert; the Moscow State Yiddish Theater (known by its Russian acronym "GOSET"); Maurice Schwartz's Yiddish Art Theatre, of New York; and the Hebrew theater "Habimah." A wide variety of other professional as well as amateur theater groups are represented with smaller amounts of material.

The Yidisher Artistn Fareyn, or Yiddish Actors' Union, advocated for actors' economic interests while striving to create a professionally run, artistically ambitious, Yiddish theatrical scene in Warsaw. From 1919-1938, its influence gradually increased until it included the majority of actors working in Poland, and collaborated with the most significant Polish Yiddish cultural figures and institutions, including E. R. Kaminska, YIVO, Literarishe Bleter, and the Landrat, or National Council of Class Trade Unions (Krajowa Rada Klasowych Związków Zawodowych). This collection contains records of annual conventions, Executive Committee meetings, correspondence with actors and theaters from Poland and around the world, and membership files on almost 600 actors.

This resource is a list of all of the landsmanshaftn for which there are records at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. The list is organized by ancestral town (that is, the town from which the founders of the organizations originally immigrated from).
YIVO has the records of over 1,500 individual landsmanshaftn. Some landsmanshaftn records comprise stand-alone collections with their own Record Group numbers. Some records are in a folder that is included in a larger collection.

Once you have identified organizations you’re interested in, check the “Physical Location” note for information on which YIVO Record Group contains the material. You can then use the ArchivesSpace toolbar to search for that record group and get more information about the contents of the collection.

The collection documents life inside the Lódz Jewish ghetto during the Nazi occupation of Poland. It consists predominantly of the records of the Eldest of the Jews in the Lódz ghetto, Chaim Mordechai Rumkowski, and of his administration. Included are original correspondence, announcements, circulars, charts, publications, reports, essays, albums and photographs.

This collection documents the experience of the Meyer family with a focus on the years from 1933 to 1943. Oscar Meyer was a successful businessman in Essen, Germany. Unable to escape National Socialist persecution himself, he was able to send his son Gerd to England in 1939. Oscar, his wife Cypora née Bendik (alternatively Carola or Karola Bendick), and their daughter Marya (alternatively Marga) were taken to Poland on October 26, 1941 and perished outside Łódź. Gerd joined the British army to fight Germany in 1944. After the war, he moved to Israel, changed his name to Gad Meiry, and later immigrated to the United States. The collection contains photocopies of family photographs, residency records from Essen, business records, Gestapo files, the passport of Gerd Meyer, and records of the seizure of the Meyer estate used for restitution claims.

This collection contains the papers of Julian Hirszhaut, a Yiddish journalist and author of several works about the Holocaust in Poland. He collected a great number of historical documents on this topic, including hundreds of eyewitness accounts, which make up an important part of this collection. The materials in this collection relate to Hirszhaut’s important work gathering documents and testimonies of the Holocaust, as well as to his other professional activities as a journalist.