From the Pages of Yedies

by ROBERTA NEWMAN

Most of the rarest and oldest books in the YIVO Library are the remnants of the Strashun Library of Vilna (present day Vilnius, Lithuania), rescued by the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFAA) branch of the Allied Armies (also known as the “Monuments Men”) at the end of World War II, or hidden away from the Nazis during the war by Jews. These books were transferred to YIVO in the late 1940s.

But other rare books in the YIVO Library have their own dramatic or mysterious trajectories. The April 1946 edition of Yedies highlights the story of one of them, a Torah commentary printed in 1710.