YIVO Institute of Jewish Research
Embraces Access to Eastern European Jewish History Over Gatekeeping
DOVID ZAKLIKOWSKI
Chaim Grade’s typewriter, preserved in the condition it was found when
the Yiddish author died in 1982, contains what are apparently the last
lines he ever wrote.

16 FEBRUARY 16, 2023 | JEWISH EXPONENT
issue, she was laid off . But one librarian who worked there for a decade-
plus and was a part of those who was fi red said it was much more than
a budget issue. “There was a schism on policy,” is all he would say,
worrying about his current job at another archive in the city.

For younger Jewish history enthusiasts, it was long in coming and
a relief. “Every time you wanted a document,” said Yehudah DovBer
Zirkind, who is an expert on Yiddish writer Chaim Grade, “[Mohrer]
insisted that there be a vetting process.”
Rick Prelinger, professor of fi lm and digital media at the University of
California, Santa Cruz, called it in a 2007 paper copyright maximalism.

“Many institutions sequester their holdings behind walls of copyright,”
he wrote, “policy, or indiff erence, rendering them inaccessible to many.”
It is the reluctance to embrace technology, wrote Prelinger, that the
resistance to providing public access to archives is marginalizing them
when they could otherwise be addressing new audiences and building
new constituencies.

‘THERE IS ALWAYS SOMETHING NEW’
Halpern said that YIVO is one of the best-kept secrets. “I wish it
weren’t,” acknowledging that it was partially the archives fault by being
slow to embrace openness. “We’ve been trying to be more accessible
to an everyday person.”
She said that this includes moving away from being gatekeepers, the
ones who protect these materials at all costs. Rather, the mission today
is to provide access in whatever way possible. “There is no point in
having historical materials if no one has access to it.”
Executive director and CEO of the archives Jonathan Brent takes
Jewish history seriously. Seated in a simple offi ce fl anked by bookcases
and a 1933 Yiddish poster of a show of a strongman proclaiming himself
as the “Polish Golden Star,” Brent, who took the position in 2009, talks
enthusiastically about the archives and its mission.

Zirkind, who has also written a guide on Yiddish archives, visited YIVO
just for that. He was researching writers Chaim Grade and Hillel Ceitlin.

In some ways, they symbolize the religious world, going through some
kind of crisis of faith, “while still being connected to where they came
from.” He would come to the archives daily for weeks at a time. It was nitty-
gritty work, looking through old fi nding aids (tools that help researchers),
many of them not digitized, and searching for names. “If you were lucky,
the name would appear, and then you will fi nd a box and folder number,”
he recalls.

You needed to have more luck that the archivist would be willing that
day to let you photograph or make copies. Just like that 1920s’ map,
with the testimony on the back, which was recently made available
online, Zirkind said with the material being digitized, the gold mine of
YIVO has now become much more accessible.

The current veteran archivist at YIVO, Leo Greenbaum, was an
anomaly among the archivists. He chose to adapt to the new generation
New York Jewish Week
T he bright hallways, expansive staircases and sleek sofas don’t
reveal what is beyond the glass doors at the Center for Jewish
History in New York City. It was a rare visit at a historical juncture
where few ever walk in the quiet halls of the Yidisher Visnshaftlekher
Institut, known today as the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, at 15
W. 16th St.

After winding through a maze of backrooms, cubicles, walls covered
with black donor plaques in Yiddish and an elevator ride up is a simple,
brightly lit room lined with shelving holding archival boxes.

Historians, professors, biographers and reporters could only dream of
what was in all those boxes: stories, narratives, history. Said to include
more than 4 million documents, with only a fraction in the weather-
controlled room on an unusually warm December afternoon, it is one of
the few places where such a rich archive of Jewish history can be found.

To give an idea of what the collection includes, Stefanie Halpern,
director of the archives, pulls out a large, frail, yellowed map of Jewish
agricultural colonies in Belarus in the 1920s. The back of the map is
crammed with Yiddish writing. She admitted that she cannot read it, but
believes that it is someone’s personal history. “Some people’s writing is
just terrible,” she said. “I guess if I spent days and days I could [fi gure it
out], but I just don’t have the time.”
But there is surely someone who could read it. An expert in Yiddish
writing in an Israeli city. Or even a Chasidic Jew in the Borough Park
neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York.

One of them may be Fruma Mohrer, who was an archivist at YIVO for
more than four decades. In 2020, in what YIVO referred to as a budget