How Real 'Monuments Men' Saved Priceless YIVO Yiddish Treasure

Feb 7, 2014

by ROBERTA NEWMAN

The new Hollywood movie The Monuments Men has been drawing renewed attention to the postwar rescue by the Allies of art and other cultural treasures looted by the Nazis.

YIVO’s history is inextricably tied to the work of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFAA) program, established by the Allied armies in 1943 to protect important heritage sites on the battlefront. As the war drew to a close, its mission expanded to include the rescue of artworks and other cultural artifacts that had been stolen from the Nazis.

Eddy Portnoy tells the story of how the MFAA saved the remnants of YIVO’s prewar collections in this week’s Forward. Read “How Real 'Monuments Men' Saved Priceless YIVO Yiddish Treasure.”

George Clooney’s movie is not the first time that the work of the Monuments Men has been dramatized. The Papers of Max Weinreich (RG 584) include both a script and an audio recording of an episode of The Eternal Light, a radio series produced by NBC in conjunction with the Jewish Theological Seminary. The April 24, 1960 broadcast was devoted to a half-hour docudrama, “The Golden Chain,” by Judah Stampfer, about the rescue of YIVO’s materials.

Actors play Zelig Kalmanovitch, Abraham Sutzkever, Max Weinreich, Seymour Pomrenze, and other key individuals who were involved in attempting to thwart the destruction of YIVO’s archives and library and bringing about the eventual rescue of what was saved. General Lucius D. Clay, military governor of the U.S. Zone in Germany from 1947-1949, gives a short speech endorsing the return of Jewish cultural treasures to Jewish communities and institutions.

One scene depicts someone in Vilna after its liberation from the Nazis coming upon a lone copy of the last book printed by YIVO before the war, a volume on the psychology of Yiddish education. He marvels, “It’s like instructions from the dead on how to bring up the next generation.”

Play the radio program.

For further reading:

Embers Plucked from the Fire: the Rescue of Jewish Cultural Treasures in Vilna, by David Fishman (YIVO Institute, New York, 2009)
From that Place and Time, by Lucy Dawidowicz, author; Professor Nancy Sinkoff, editor (Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ 2008)
Record groups 1-89 in the YIVO Archives represent materials returned to YIVO from the Offenbach Archival Depot in 1947.

List compiled by Eddy Portnoy, YIVO’s Academic Advisor & Exhibitions Curator.

Roberta Newman is YIVO’s Director of Digital Initiatives.