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



and remained in his position when the cuts at YIVO were taking place. He
said that every morning, he heads to work not knowing what that day will
bring. “There is always something to do, something new.”
He explains that the basic function of any archive is to collect and
preserve, but “just sitting on materials is not very productive.” It needs to
be accessible to the public, and YIVO has in recent years embraced that.

“It used to be that we were only used by scholars,” Halpern said. “It is
hard to walk into an archive.” YIVO has strived to make the archive a more
welcoming place. It is the attitude, the changing of policies and the digitizing
of the archives.

To Greenbaum, the digitizing is another plus. “Many [documents] are
very fragile; the more you handle them, the more they deteriorate,” he
said. Digitization gives you back-up copies in case of a fi re or another
calamity. But it also makes the material more accessible to researchers.

‘IT HAS BEEN A SLOW PROCESS’
Since becoming the director of the archives, Halpern has made giving
the public more access her mission. “It has been a slow process,” she
said, but she has an advantage on her side. “We have a whole slew of
new archivists, a generation of individuals to whom this material is not
so personal.” They have all embraced the open policy.

Of course, there are risks involved; people could choose not to give
credit to the archives for the manuscripts they use. Some also thought
that without proper attribution by users, it could cause funders not to
realize the extent of the need of the archive.

However, said Greenbaum, having material online has caused more
publicity of what YIVO has. It has brought discussions on social media,
and more authors are using their material. “I don’t think it made things
worse,” he said.

‘WE HAVE GROWN AND FLOURISHED’
Back in the small YIVO conference room, Brent an academic, author,
historian and publisher, is adamant that Jewish history is not just about
religion, but about culture. The food Jews ate, what they dressed, the
songs they sang, the relations between men and women or the way they
raised their children — all of this needs to be learned and studied.

For many today, he said, that culture might be construed as the
Holocaust, lox and bagels and “Fiddler on the Roof.” He said that has been
a part of why an entire generation of Jews have lost interest in Jewish life.

For those who do take interest in their family history, it many times
focuses on the genealogy. “It completely ignores where they came from,”
he lamented. “They get it in a bottle. They don’t have to do any work. It is
a good-feel thing.”
He stated that YIVO is devoted to how Jews got from religious
communities in Spain and the Middle East to communities that participated
in the secular world, but retained their Jewish identity. “The materiality of
Jewish life,” he said, “and its social development.”
To facilitate this, the archive recently reached two signifi cant milestones.

Besides making available online the papers of writer Chaim Grade
and his infamous wife, Inna Hecker (See Opinions: “YIVO Digitizes
Writer Chaim Grade’s Archive, a Yiddish Treasure with a Soap-Opera
Backstory”), YIVO has reached beyond the archive it physically controls.

In cooperation with the Lithuanian government, it digitized 2.5 million
documents and 12,200 books — representing 500 years of Jewish
history in Eastern Europe — under the Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Online
Collections project.

The YIVO archive, he continues, can off er more substance on what
Jewish life was in the communities their ancestors came from. Once this
was much more diffi cult to access. With the archives’ change of direction,
saids Brent, people could come to YIVO to discover more about their
roots: “We are letting people in, and we are letting information out.”
It is for that reason, he noted, that over the past few years, “we have
grown and fl ourished.” ■
Dovid Zaklikowski is a freelance writer and the author of more than 20
biographies. ▲ Jonathan Brent,
executive director of
YIVO, discusses the
archive in a December
2022 interview.

Dovid Zaklikowski
▲ The reading room at the Center for
Jewish History in New York City, where
YIVO archives is headquartered
▼ Stefanie Halpern, director of archives at YIVO,
exhibits a manuscript at the archives.

Photos: Dovid Zaklikowski; Background: AF-studio/DigitalVisions Vectors;
Photo Frame: alubalish/E+; Map: PeskyMonkey/iStock/Getty Images Plus
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