As YIVO Institute for Jewish Research archivists pored over 200,000 pages of materials from the literary estate of acclaimed Yiddish writer Chaim Grade, which the nonprofit acquired in 2010 after Grade’s widow died, they knew of rumors of an unpublished novel. Several years into their research, they found the manuscript of Sons and Daughters, which, with YIVO’s help, was published in English last month.
Excavating lost Jewish cultural gems has been a cornerstone of YIVO’s mission for 100 years, since it was founded in 1925, according to Jonathan Brent, the nonprofit’s CEO, who has led the organization for more than 15 years.
“This is a prime example of what we do,” Brent told JNS. “In my estimation, Grade is the Yiddish William Faulkner. What William Faulkner did for the American South, Chaim Grade has done for Vilna.”
Grade’s novel brings to life the Jewish experience in Eastern Europe before World War II, according to Brent.
“He writes with unbelievable, almost unbearable love of that time and that place,” he told JNS. “He explores every cobblestone of Jewish life before the war. He looks in every nook and cranny of Jewish experience from the most exalted to the least.”
On a visit to YIVO’s sprawling archive at the Center for Jewish History near the Union Square neighborhood in Manhattan in January, JNS met with executive staff and archival directors and toured the facility, as YIVO has been celebrating its centennial year with exhibitions, publications and public programs.
To honor the milestone, New York City Mayor Eric Adams declared March 24, 2025, as YIVO Institute for Jewish Research Day.
Founded in Vilna, Poland—now Vilnius, Lithuania—YIVO became the first major center for Jewish scholarship in Eastern Europe, according to the nonprofit. Today, its Manhattan archive holds the world’s largest collection of Eastern European Jewish materials—24 million items, including rare manuscripts, photographs, recordings, and the largest Yiddish-language library in the world.
“Most American Jews, which constitute close to 50% of the Jews in the world today, know nothing of their history,” Brent told JNS. “Whether they’re Ashkenazi, or German or French, they know very little.”
The reason, according to Brent, is that they know very little about Yiddish.
“They know that their parents, grandparents or great-grandparents may have spoken it, but it’s a ‘geshmata’ language to them, only filled with jargon and throw-away curse words,” he said.
Brent told JNS that YIVO’s vision is “to get American Jews to understand that their culture—the culture out of which they came, their grandparents, their great grandparents, who came from Eastern Europe, from Russia, from wherever—was a much bigger, complex, important story than has yet been told.”
Because so few laypeople today understand Yiddish, global Jewry struggles to connect with Jewish history, a gap that YIVO aims to bridge through its expansive online resources and global reach, according to Brent.
“What I see as the larger vision of this organization is that we become a global Jewish organization that can reach people in Ukraine, Switzerland, Italy, even in Idaho, and make people feel that they are part of this living Jewish cultural heritage that we represent,” he said.
“They will have access to our classes and to our programs, and they will be able to see our online museum and, eventually, maybe some will come here and enjoy all of this in person,” he said.
‘Library of Congress’
Founded in 1925 by linguist Max Weinreich, YIVO, the Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut, or Jewish Scientific Institute, was created to document and preserve the everyday life, language and culture of Eastern European Jewry.
Eddy Portnoy, director of exhibitions at YIVO, told JNS that the institute was founded amid growing concern that traditional Jewish life in Eastern Europe was vanishing.
“The shtetl culture was beginning to disappear due to urbanization and industrialization,” he said. “As Jews moved from villages into cities, everything about their way of life was changing.”
To capture that world before it was lost, YIVO began collecting everyday materials from ordinary Jews, including stories, songs, jokes, recipes and even instructions on how floors were cleaned or what was cooked on holidays, according to Portnoy.
“They really wanted to know how these people lived,” Portnoy said. “They created a library and an archive. They asked the public at large to just send things in.”
“YIVO was conceived as a kind of Smithsonian Institution slash Library of Congress of Eastern European Jews,” he added.
When World War II broke out, YIVO’s headquarters in Vilna fell into the Soviet sector and was eventually overtaken by the Nazis. Portnoy told JNS that while YIVO had offices in Berlin, Warsaw and New York, only the New York branch survived the war.
“The head of YIVO, who happened to be in Belgium at a linguistics conference, couldn’t go back to Vilna because it was too dangerous,” he said. “So he went to New York and started working out of YIVO’s New York office. In 1940, he declared YIVO New York the official YIVO, because they had lost contact with the Vilna YIVO.”
‘They want that authenticity’
Today, Portnoy draws from YIVO’s vast archive to curate exhibitions, such as “Am Yisrael High: the Story of Jews and Cannabis,” “Yiddish Fight Club” and, most recently, “Runaway Husbands,” which explores rabbinical court cases of abandonment.
“We have scholars, but also playwrights and authors, who mine the archives here for artistic projects because they want that authenticity that YIVO has, that they can’t really find anywhere else,” he said.
Portnoy told JNS that, as part of its centennial celebration, YIVO is releasing a book titled YIVO in 100 Objects, to be published in June 2025. It will feature writings from scholars and others about meaningful items from the archive.
He told JNS that YIVO is not only a scholarly institution but also a place where anyone can engage with the Jewish past in a meaningful and personal way. “If you want to legitimize your understanding of your own past, you would look to a place like this,” he said.
‘Inflection point’
Ben Kaplan, director of education at YIVO, told JNS that the nonprofit is the only Jewish secular cultural organization to have survived the Holocaust and successfully reestablished itself in a new country.
“We’re the stewards of a civilization that was rooted in Eastern Europe but became a global phenomenon,” he said. “We’re here to preserve, protect and promote this heritage. It’s a huge part of the Jewish story.”
Kaplan told JNS that YIVO finds itself at a crossroads.
“We’re at a historical inflection point,” he said. “We have fewer and fewer survivors who were born in Eastern Europe, who came from that civilization, and so we, their children and grandchildren, have to figure out what to do with that legacy.”
As part of its centennial year, YIVO is expanding educational efforts to make that legacy more accessible worldwide. Its flagship summer program, launched in 1968, brings students from more than a dozen countries to New York for six weeks of immersive Yiddish study, according to Kaplan.
“We have 24 million objects. We have the actual material culture—the physical things people wrote, saved, passed down. The stuff that was worth saving,” he told JNS.
“We want to create the Jewish culture of the future,” he added. “The only way to do that in a meaningful way is to pull from the treasures of the past and reimagine them.”