YIVO in the News & Staff Notes – May 2014

The new YIVO Digital Archive on Jewish Life in Poland is now linked to from many other websites and has received coverage in The New York Times: "New Web Portal Provides Access to Historic Materials on Jewish Life in Poland," Jewish Heritage Europe, and Arts Journal. Mosaic Magazine reprinted the Times article.

The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe was designated as "the single best resource on Jewish life in interwar Central and Eastern Europe" by the Centropa Summer Academy in its May e-newsletter.

Cathy Young reported on the appearance of Josef Zissels, chairman of the Assocation of Jewish Communities and Organizations in Ukraine at a program at YIVO on April 23, in a Newsday article: "Fascism, anti-Semitism and Ukraine."

A letter from YIVO Executive Director Jonathan Brent is quoted in an article on Yiddish by Avraham Avi-Hai, "The POSTman Knocks Twice: From Vulgarity to 44,000 books," in The Jerusalem Post. The 44,000 books in the title is a reference to Jonathan’s comment:

I read your article in the J-Post about cultural murder with great appreciation. I hope you know of YIVO’s efforts on behalf of Yiddish and rebuilding the history and culture of East European Jewish civilization. We have launched a major project to reconstruct digitally the famous Strashun Library of Vilna and to digitize the entire corpus of Yiddish language books – approximately 44,000 titles. This will be the first comprehensive library of Yiddish works in the world. We will make all of this available on-line through a well-designed Web portal.

The work of the One Thousand Children organization with YIVO archivists is mentioned in "Man, 90, found refuge with 'One Thousand Children'" in the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Lorin Sklamberg describes his years of work at YIVO in a video on YouTube posted by the Wexler Oral History Project of the Yiddish Book Center.