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
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM 17