The Jewish Research Institute (YIVO), founded in 1925 in the Polish city known to Jews as Vilna (now Vilnius, Lithuania), contained the world’s largest archive of East European Jewry before World War II. Parts of the collection survived the Holocaust through a series of bizarre twists involving the Nazi institute for “the study of the Jewish question” and the U.S. Army, and most of the materials eventually made their way to YIVO’s new headquarters in New York City. But others remained behind the Iron Curtain—until now, when at last the two collections will be reunited via the Internet.
“These materials are Holocaust survivors,” said David E. Fishman, a professor of Jewish history at the Jewish Theological Seminary who is working on a chronicle of the YIVO collection’s rescue. “Like a survivor, these materials were controlled by the Germans. Like a survivor, they were in hiding. The fact that they were saved is miraculous.”
Read more on New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/03/nyregion/split-up-by-holocaust-top-collection-of-yiddish-works-will-reunite-digitally.html