From the Pages of Yedies
by ROBERTA NEWMAN
In 1937, Yedies reported on its survey of pinkasim (Jewish communal registers), whose mission was the gathering of information about pinkasim in Jewish communities all over Poland.
Over one hundred communities had responded to YIVO’s call for participation in the survey, yielding information on over 300 pinkasim, including several from the 17th and 18th centuries. (The article provides a long list of zamlers [collectors] and communities.)
As part of the project, the noted historian Raphael Mahler, an editor and researcher in YIVO’s Historical Section, made a special visit to the town of Pińczów to examine pinkasim, and also inspected registers at the S. An-Ski Jewish Historical Ethnographic Society and other institutions in Vilna. Yedies noted that personnel of the Joint Distribution Committee was also providing assistance to the project.
But YIVO was aware that it was scraping only the tip of the iceberg and that there were many more pinkasim out there that were in danger of being lost. Many had already disappeared. Some were in private hands and not being properly cared for. “In order to rescue them for Jewish history,” the article noted, it was “essential that they be copied and that the transcripts be centralized in the archives of the Yiddish Scientific Institute” [YIVO’s original official name].
We will probably never know how many of the pinkasim still remaining in Poland in the 1930s were lost during the Holocaust. Among the collections in the YIVO Archives which contain some of surviving pinkasim, fragments of pinkasim, and transcripts from Jewish communities in various lands include:
RG 2 Lithuanian Jewish Communities
RG 116 Territorial Collection, Poland I
RG 223 Abraham Sutzkever-Szmerke Kaczerginski Collection
RG 108 Rabbinical and Historical Manuscripts
RG 242 Personenstandarchiv Koblenz
In the autumn of 2013, YIVO co-sponsored, with the Center for Jewish History, an exhibition on the Jewish community of Metz, featuring a rare 18th-century pinkas from Metz, France, from the YIVO Archives.
View the exhibition website.