News & Features

On January 21, 2015, YIVO and the Museum of the City of New York presented “Behind the Lens: New York Jews Between the Wars,” a public program in conjunction with Letters to Afar (October 22, 2014-March 31, 2015), an immersive video art installation at the Museum first premiered by YIVO at POLIN - Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw in 2013.

The four scholars on the panel used rarely seen primary source materials to explore the back-story to Letters to Afar, which features home movies of Poland in the 1920s-1930s made, for the most part, by Jews from America on trips back to their home towns.

Assemble the letterheads of Jewish organizations, institutions, and individuals in Europe, North and South America, and Palestine from the 1890s to the eve of World War II in 1939 and you have a portrait of the Jewish world: transnational; diverse in language, political, and religious orientation; and flourishing. Di gantse velt ...

A scholar talks about the YIVO autobiographies as a research resource (1965).

Dr. David E. Fishman, professor of Jewish History at The Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTS), serving as the Jacob Kronhill Visiting Scholar in East European Jewish History for the Spring 2015 semester at YIVO.

YIVO’s Board of Directors and staff mourn the passing of Solomon (Shloyme) Krystal, who died on February 2, 2015, just shy of his 103rd birthday.

Shloyme’s long and extraordinary life spanned almost the entire 20th century and a piece of the 21st. Born in Warsaw before World War I, he was the oldest of 4 children. At the end of the 1930s, he worked at the Medem Sanatorium, an educational and health retreat for children and adults at risk for tuberculosis. He survived World War II in the Soviet Union and went to Sweden in 1946, after a short time in Poland.

After he immigrated to the United States in 1952, Shloyme worked in the New York Cloak Joint Board of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. He and his sister, Hannah Fryshdorf, became involved with YIVO: Hannah as its long-time assistant director and Shloime, around 1980, as a volunteer in the YIVO Archives and a member of YIVO’s Board of Directors.

The death of Alberto Nisman, the Argentinean federal prosecutor who was investigating the terrorist attack on the AMIA building in Buenos Aires in1994, in which 85 people died and many rare and irreplaceable collections of IWO (the Argentinean branch of YIVO in existence since 1928) were destroyed, has drawn renewed ...

by ROBERTA NEWMAN

Almost immediately after the end of World War II, a new center of Jewish life in Poland began to take shape in western Poland, in Lower Silesia, a formerly German territory de facto awarded to Poland in the Potsdam Conference of July 1945.

This little-known chapter of postwar Jewish life is the topic of research now being conducted by Dr. Kamil Kijek, a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Jewish History. His study, entitled “Polish Shtetl after the Holocaust? Jews in Dzierżoniów, 1945–1968” focuses on one particular town in Lower Silesia, which was settled by survivors who stayed in the region after liberation. They were later joined by Jews repatriated from the Soviet Union, and others who had survived in hiding in Poland or returned from concentration camps in Germany. Jews also migrated to the region to escape anti-Jewish violence in central Poland, including the 1946 Kielce pogrom. There were soon enough Jews in Lower Silesia to make it a good base for revival of Jewish life in Poland.

Assemble the letterheads of Jewish organizations, institutions, and individuals in Europe, North and South America, and Palestine from the 1890s to the eve of World War II in 1939 and you have a portrait of the Jewish world: transnational; diverse in language, political, and religious orientation; and flourishing. Di gantse velt ...

This episode of YIVO’s radio program on WEVD, originally broadcast on October 3, 1965, is devoted to an interview with Dr. Jacob Robinson about his book, And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight; The Eichmann Trial, the Jewish Catastrophe, a rebuttal to Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on ...

Letters to Afar

YIVO’s and Polin’s video installation at the Museum of the City of New York, Letters to Afar, continues to draw in visitors and has been extended another week until March 31, 2015. An article in the New York Post reported on a visitor’s emotional encounter with one particular film in the exhibition, “Professor finds long-lost home movies playing at NYC museum.” The article was also translated into Dutch.

The installation will open at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco on February 26.