The YIVO Vilna Project | SYS-CON MEDIA

"The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research is pleased to announce the launch of The Vilna Project, a seven-year international project to preserve, digitize and virtually reunite YIVO's prewar archives located in New York City and Vilnius, Lithuania, through a dedicated web portal. The Project will also digitally reconstruct the historic Strashun Library of Vilna, one of the great prewar libraries in Europe. Project partners are The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, The Central State Archives of Lithuania and the National Library of Lithuania. In 1941, the Nazis destroyed YIVO in Vilna and ransacked the archives and library. A portion of YIVO's archives was sent to Frankfurt to become the basis of the Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question; another part was hidden in Vilna; another part was destroyed. In 1946, the U.S. Army discovered the seized YIVO materials in the train depot in Offenbach, Germany and returned them to YIVO. The part that remained in Vilna was saved from the Soviets by a Lithuanian librarian, Antanas Ulpis, and remained hidden in the basement of a church until 1989. This Project will digitally reunite the two halves of the YIVO collection. YIVO's original prewar archives and library are the preeminent source of documentation on the subject of East European Jewish civilization, which spanned over 1,000 years. The majority of this unique collection has not been conserved, preserved and digitized, and remains at risk of deterioration and loss. The YIVO Vilna Project will create the single largest digital collection related to East European Jewish civilization, including the largest collection of Yiddish language materials in the world. The Project's primary objective is to ensure the collections' survival and public accessibility ..."