About the YIVO Library

YIVO is the great repository of East European Ashkenazic culture, of which American Jewry is the heir. Together with the YIVO Archives, the YIVO Library represents the single largest and most comprehensive collection of materials on East European Jewish civilization in the world.

The YIVO Library has nearly 400,000 volumes in all European languages, and is the world’s only academic library specializing in the history, languages, literature, culture, folklore, and religious traditions of East European Jewry. It has books in many languages, but also constitutes the largest collection of Yiddish-language books, pamphlets, and newspapers in the world.

The Library’s holdings include:

Collections of literature in Yiddish, Hebrew, and other languages.
Yizkor (memorial) books from destroyed Jewish communities, and other important publications related to the Holocaust and the rebuilding of Jewish life after WWII.
Rabbinic books, including the rare Hebrew books of the Strashun Library Collection.
Works on Zionism and Jewish social movements and contemporary Jewish studies.
The private collections of famous Jewish scholars, writers and cultural activists, such as Chaim Zhitlowsky, Elias Tcherikover, Max Weinreich, Kalman Marmor, Shmuel Niger, Sholem Perlmutter, and Chaim Grade.

Best described as a "collection of collections," the YIVO Library has been built through the amalgamation of a number of private and institutional libraries. Shortly before the transfer of YIVO's headquarters to New York in 1940, the Central Jewish Library and Archives (CJLA), a repository of American Yiddish materials which had been founded in New York in 1938, was amalgamated with the American branch of YIVO. The CJLA included the Winchevsky Collection of Jewish labor history and Yiddish literature. By the end of the war, the growing YIVO library in New York acquired the library of the Chicago Yiddish publisher M. Ceshinsky and of the Yiddish theoretician Chaim Zhitlowsky. The Tcherikower Collection of Jewish history, hidden in France during the war, was acquired in 1946. Since then, YIVO has continued to acquire private libraries.

Thanks to these varied collections, the YIVO Library is especially strong in Yiddish literature, theater, Yiddish linguistics and lexicography, and historical writings, including many books and serials found in no other research library in the world.