Private Libraries

Since relocating to the U.S. in 1940, YIVO has acquired the private libraries of a number of prominent Jewish scholars and writers, including:

Essayist Shlomo Bickel

Folklorist  J.L. (Yehude Leyb) Cahan

YIVO librarian Mendl Elkin

Holocaust historian Philip Friedman

Novelist Chaim Grade

Poet H. Leivick

YIVO Archivist Ezekiel Lifschutz

Literary historian Kalman Marmor

Literary critic Shmuel Niger

Cultural historian Shlomo Noble

Novelist Joseph Opatoshu

Theater archivist Sholem Perlmutter: 500 Yiddish dramas (many of them containing written stage directions in the margins).

Lexicographer Nahum Stutchkoff

Linguist and sociologist and YIVO founder Max Weinreich: 4,000 volumes, many of them linguistic publications used in the preparation of Weinreich's History of the Yiddish Language.  

Almost all of these individuals also donated their private papers to the YIVO Archives. See the Guide to the YIVO Archives to obtain information about each collection.

Elias Tcherikower Collection

Of particular note is the private library of Jewish historian Elias Tcherikower, consisting of 3,500 volumes, including many important works on Jews in the Russian Empire. 

Tcherikower (1881-1943), a scholar and a  political activist in the Labor Zionist movement at the turn of the twentieth century, was co-founder of the YIVO Institute in Vilna in 1925. He later became a member of the YIVO Executive Board and secretary of the Historical Section of YIVO. Between 1918 and 1920, he was involved in a project in Kiev to collect and publish documents on pogroms in the Ukraine during the civil war. He was a founder of the Mizrakh Yidisher Historisher Arkhiv (Ostjuedisches Historisches Archiv), established in Berlin in 1921 to preserve and publish the pogrom documents. He also was involved in celebrated court cases, such as the 1926-1927 Paris trial of Shalom Schwarzbard, assassin of Simon Petlyura; and the 1934-1935 Bern trial regarding the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He contributed to and edited numerous periodicals and encyclopedias and was the author of historical works on the Jews of France and the labor movement in the United States.

Tcherikower’s extensive library and archives were hidden in France during World War II and later brought to YIVO in New York. The Tcherikower Collection is especially strong in its documentation, in several languages, of Jewish life in the Russian Empire. Some of the Russian-language pamphlets and books from the Tcherikower Collection are available on microfilm from Brill Publishers. RG 81, Tcherikower's papers, photographs, and other artifacts including (important primary sources on the anti-Jewish pogroms in Ukraine in 1918-1920) can be found in several collections in the YIVO Archives.