Overview of Library
The YIVO Library is the world’s only academic library specializing in the history, languages, literature, culture, folklore, and religious traditions of East European Jewry. It contains nearly 400,000 volumes of books and periodical editions. (Manuscripts and other special collections are held by the YIVO Archives.) Approximately 40,000 volumes are in Yiddish, making the YIVO Library the largest collection of Yiddish-language works in the world.
The Library includes:
- Collections of literature in Yiddish, Hebrew, and other languages.
- Yizkor (memorial) books from destroyed Jewish communities.
- Rabbinic books.
- 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.
from the Sea). London, 1908.
The YIVO Library includes books and periodicals from its prewar collections in Vilna, which were confiscated by the Nazis during the Holocaust, later found in Germany after the war, and eventually sent to the New York YIVO in 1947. The library also holds treasures rescued by the so-called “Paper Brigade,” Jews who risked their lives to hide books and documents inside and outside the Vilna ghetto, thus saving them from Nazi pillage.
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.