YIVO Welcomes Wesleyan University Students Investigating Jewish Material Culture

By JENNIFER YOUNG

Professor Magda Teter, an instructor in YIVO’s Winter Program on Ashkenazi Civilization, visited YIVO on April 30 with her class from Wesleyan University, to participate in a full-day workshop on Jewish material culture. Teter’s Wesleyan course in East European Jewish History aims to take students beyond the common tropes of shtetl life and into a “more complex, textured world” of Jewish civilization in Poland, from the thirteenth century through the forced migrations of 1968. In order to give the students a chance to engage more fully with the ideas discussed in class, the course includes a “service learning” component: the students are currently participating in a project to examine and research artifacts from the Adath Israel Congregation of Middletown’s collection of East European Judaica, and are working on creating detailed descriptions for some of the items on display there. This focus on the tangible aspects of Jewish history prompted Teter to bring the students on a day-long field trip to the Center for Jewish History, in order to explore Jewish ritual objects, rare books, and letters in the collections of Yeshiva University Museum (YUM) and YIVO.

The morning session of the day-long workshop was led by independent curator Gabriel M. Goldstein in YUM’s Discovery Room. Donning black nitrile gloves, the students handled a Gothic tower-shaped havdole spice box. Raising the question of why a Jewish ritual item would echo recognizable Christian architectural forms, Goldstein pointed out that many Jewish ritual items had in fact been created by Christian silversmiths, since Jews had been barred from silver guilds. Goldstein demonstrated that the complicated history of Jewish-Christian relations could be rendered tangible in filigree. This one example highlighted his larger message, that experiential education can be a valuable way of interpreting and transmitting knowledge of Jewish history and culture.

After a lively lunchtime discussion with the Max Weinreich Center’s Academic Advisor, Dr. Eddy Portnoy, who delivered a presentation on the history of YIVO, the Wesleyan class joined YIVO’s senior archivist Fruma Mohrer and YIVO’s Head of Library and Archives, Lyudmila Sholokhova, for a close examination of some of YIVO’s rare books and archival holdings. “The YIVO archive possesses 24 million documents in over 20 different languages,” said Mohrer. While the bulk of them date to the 19th and 20th centuries, the collection spans over 500 years of Jewish life around the world. The students examined a wide range of items, from a Spanish tax document dated 1491, to a tiny hand-written volume of the Talmud historically belonging to the Rothschild family, and a brightly-hued Soviet Yiddish illustrated edition of Khad Gadye, by the artist El Lissitzky.

Fruma Mohrer described YIVO’s interwar mission collecting materials of Jewish daily life (zamlen in Yiddish). Shtetl community registers, Tsarist legal files, Yiddish algebra workbooks and theater posters—everything was considered important to telling the story of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. These items took on added significance after the Holocaust, when it was clear that similar items would no longer be produced there. During and after World War II, YIVO’s zeal to collect became a form of spiritual resistance, and then of cultural reconstruction. The Wesleyan students viewed a fragment of Herman Kruk’s diary from the Vilna ghetto, discovered after the war by partisan and Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever. While examining the diary fragment, Magda Teter suggested to her students that, despite the prevalence of digital archival resources for researchers today, nothing surpasses the thrill of discovery, or replaces the pleasure of touching a historical document or object that has survived the ravages of time.

Thousands of researchers from around the world travel to YIVO’s archives every year for the privilege of viewing YIVO’s materials, noted Fruma Mohrer. Although they might be able to access a digital copy online, nothing replaces the experience of handling historical articles such as a letter by Sholem Aleichem or the legal files of Nicholas I. She remarked, “The way people lived can really be felt through the objects they created, and the way they used them in daily life.” Therefore, the purpose of an archive and library like YIVO’s is to preserve these fragments of the past so that they may come to life for future generations.

Jennifer Young is YIVO’s Director of Education.

YIVO welcomes visits from college classes and other groups, and can offer tours designed to accommodate a variety of interests, needs, and levels. Please contact yivomail@yivo.cjh.org for more information.