What leading matzo company was founded by a Litvak in 1888?
The B. Manischewitz Company
was founded by Dov Behr Abramson in Cincinnati, Ohio. Abramson was born in Salant, Lithuania and immigrated to the United States in 1885, where he changed his name to Dov Behr Manischewitz.
Man, Oh Manischewitz, What A Wine
Listen to the 1954 Manischewitz wine jingle, found in the YIVO Sound Archive:
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Unidentified vocal group and instrumental ensemble |
Manischewitz and YIVO
Did you know that the Manischewitz Company played a part in the rescue of YIVO's collections during World War II?
In 1941, the Nazis ransacked the YIVO Institute in Vilna, Poland (now Vilnius, Lithuania). Many documents were destroyed and a group of Vilna Ghetto workers (many of whom had worked for or been associated with YIVO) were forced to sort through the collections and select materials to be shipped to Frankfurt, for use in the Nazi Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question. The U.S. Army recovered these documents after the war and in 1947, 465 crates of Jewish cultural treasures were shipped to the United States.
They were initially stored in the Manischewitz Matzo warehouse in New Jersey (pictured), after which they became part of YIVO’s collections. Today, they are part of the Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Online Collections.
View a selection of Manischewitz’s holiday sales materials found in our Archives, ca. 1930s-1940s:
Thanks to our supporters around the globe, YIVO has made significant progress in digitizing our collection of over 24 million archival documents – to preserve the riches of Jewish heritage contained within them and make them available to researchers, scholars, and individuals like you around the world.
This Passover, support our work to preserve and share the legacy of the Jewish people.