YIVO Receives $54,000 Donation for 2025 Yiddish Summer Program Centennial Scholarships

(New York, NY) – The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research is delighted to announce that it has received $54,000 from The Leona Zweig Rosenberg Trust to support summer Yiddish study at the 2025 YIVO-Bard Uriel Weinreich Summer Program in Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture.

YIVO is celebrating its centennial anniversary this year having been founded in Vilna, Poland (now Vilnius, Lithuania) in 1925. YIVO is the only secular Jewish cultural organization to have survived the war and has the longest-running intensive Yiddish summer program in the world.

Established in 1968, the YIVO-Bard Uriel Weinreich Summer Program in Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture offers peerless instruction in the Yiddish language and an in-depth exploration of the literature and culture of East European Jews and their communities around the world. The Program is run under the auspices of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and Bard College.

This donation will enable YIVO to award Centennial Scholarships to a select number of students attending the 2025 YIVO-Bard Summer program. The scholarships cover a combination of tuition, travel, housing, and living expenses in summer 2025.

For over 50 years, the Summer Program has bolstered the field of Jewish Studies and the broader Jewish cultural landscape by training generations of scholars, teachers, librarians, archivists, artists, translators, and more, fostering the continuity of Yiddish language and culture in the United States and internationally. Summer Program Alumni have gone on to be pioneers in academia, museum work, the arts, and beyond, including novelist Dara Horn, Tony award-winning director Rebecca Taichman, Grammy award-winning musician Lorin Sklamberg, and filmmaker Asaf Galay, as well as renowned Jewish Studies scholars such as Jonathan Boyarin, Kathryn Hellerstein, Cecile Kuznitz, and Tony Michels.

“Every year, the Summer Program receives more student applications than we can support,” says Ben Kaplan, YIVO’s Director of Education. “These 2025 Centennial Scholarships will provide an opportunity for the scholars and cultural leaders of the future to receive essential training in Yiddish language and culture at YIVO. We anticipate this will have a significant impact on the field.”

The YIVO-Bard Summer Program is named after Uriel Weinreich, a prominent linguist and professor at Columbia University who specialized in Yiddish and died tragically young at the age of forty in 1967. Uriel was the first child of YIVO founder Max Weinreich. In 1949, he published College Yiddish, the first Yiddish textbook for use in American higher education, which is still used in Yiddish classrooms across the globe today.

The Centennial Scholarships will be offered in celebration of YIVO’s 100th anniversary, marking 100 years of Yiddish scholarship and the perpetuation of Jewish culture around the world.

Applicants interested in applying for a Centennial Scholarship should submit the general YIVO-Bard Summer Program application. To access the application and learn more about the YIVO-Bard Summer Program, visit summerprogram.yivo.org.

For any media inquiries please contact:
Shelly Freeman
Chief of Staff

YIVO

The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research is dedicated to the preservation and study of the history and culture of East European Jewry worldwide. For a century, YIVO has pioneered new forms of Jewish scholarship, research, education, and cultural expression. Our public programs and exhibitions, as well as online and on-site courses, extend our outreach to a global community. The YIVO Archives contains 24 million unique items and YIVO’s Library has over 400,000 volumes—the single largest resource for the study of East European Jewish life in the world. yivo.org / yivo.org/the-whole-story