YIVO celebrates its 100th anniversary

Founded in 1925 in Vilnius, YIVO—the Jewish Scientific Institute—aimed to be the “home” of Yiddish culture. One hundred years later, based in New York, it remains the global reference for the study and transmission of Ashkenazi culture. To mark this centenary, we met with historian Cécile Kuznitz, who recounts the intellectual and political adventure of this unique institution.

 

This year, YIVO celebrates its 100th anniversary. But what is YIVO? The Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut, or Jewish Scientific Institute, founded in 1925 in Vilnius, Lithuania (then Wilno, Poland), aims to preserve, teach, and research Ashkenazi culture from Germany to Russia. One could say that this organization was initially conceived as a kind of Yiddish Academy: its purpose was to standardize, defend, and illustrate the language then spoken by the majority of Jews around the world, and to collect all materials that nourished its culture.  This Jewish scientific institute, or Yiddish (Yiddish meaning “Jewish”), conceived in Eastern Europe and relocated during World War II to New York, USA, became the Institute for Jewish Research in English, but retained its Yiddish acronym: YIVO. Today, located at the Center for Jewish History, it continues to study and promote this language to a new audience of students and researchers. To learn more about the history of YIVO since its inception, as well as its past and present challenges, K. spoke with Cécile Kuznitz, an American historian specializing in the subject, who holds the Patricia Ross Weis ’52 Chair in Jewish History and Culture at Bard College. Her major work, YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture: Scholarship for the Yiddish Nation (Cambridge University Press, 2014), explores the history of YIVO and its role in building a modern Jewish identity through the Yiddish language and culture.

YIVO was founded in 1925. What was the state of the Yiddish language at that time?

At that point, there was already a very dynamic cultural production in Yiddish. First of all, Yiddish was the everyday language of the vast majority of the world’s Jewish population. In 1897, a census conducted in the Russian Empire showed that 95% of Jews in that territory spoke Yiddish. And in 1925, Ashkenazi Jews constituted by far the largest share of the Jewish population worldwide, so it can be said that about 80% of Jews were using this language at the time. In addition, a very active cultural movement around Yiddish had been flourishing for several decades, since the end of the 19th century, with a Yiddish press, theater, and literature. The first secular Yiddish elementary schools appeared during World War I and developed in the early 1920s. It was then that the need was felt to create a higher authority to build, in the words of the time, the roof of the edifice of secular Yiddish culture: an institution dedicated to research and higher education, as well as to the standardization of Yiddish.

In these circumstances, why was the institute built specifically in Wilno, Poland—Vilnius in Lithuanian, Vilna in Russian, Vilnè in Yiddish?

The idea of creating an institute did not originate in Vilnè. Nokhem Shtif, the linguist and translator behind the project, was living in Saint Petersburg, home to a community of Yiddish intellectuals and writers. After the Russian Revolution, many of them moved to Kiev, then to Berlin, where the Yiddish and Hebrew cultural scene flourished in the 1920s. When Shtif launched the idea of a “yidisher akademisher institut,” a Yiddish academic institute, he believed that its headquarters should be in Berlin. He sent his project to acquaintances in other capitals, including New York. But it was from Vilna that he received the most enthusiastic response. There, linguists and authors Max Weinreich and Zalmen Reyzen, who had already been thinking about a similar project, were thrilled to discover Shtif’s memorandum. They immediately set to work. In fact, no formal decision was made to establish YIVO’s headquarters in Vilna, but it seemed obvious given the energy there. In 1928, plans were drawn up to construct a building to house the YIVO headquarters in Vilnius. The institute had and would continue to have branches in other cities. Among these, the branch in Buenos Aires, Argentina, would continue to operate for a long time and eventually become an independent institution, which still exists today. The branches in Miami and Chicago also lasted for quite some time.

Aesthetically, what did the building constructed in Vilnius look like?

YIVO’s first offices were located in the home of linguist Max Weinreich, who became the central figure of the institute. Then premises were rented across the street. Finally, an entire building was purchased, not in the old part of town with its narrow streets, where the Jewish community traditionally lived, but in a new neighborhood with wide, tree-lined sidewalks. To enter the building, one crossed a lawn, which made a big impression compared to the traditional Jewish courtyards, which were overcrowded and devoid of any greenery. YIVO acquired a wooden building, which it converted into offices, libraries, and a reading room—all very modern and airy. The institute’s image was resolutely forward-looking.

Ideologically, what role did the Jewish national movement play in the construction of YIVO?

At the time YIVO was founded, there were various Jewish national movements. Zionism was one of them, and diasporic nationalism was another, which believed that Jews should continue to live where they were, but fight for their rights and strengthen their culture as a minority. For many diasporic nationalists, developing Yiddish culture was essential, as it was the everyday language of Jews in Eastern Europe. In their view, one of YIVO’s goals should be to enhance the prestige of Yiddish and create a standardized version of the language to make it comparable to other European languages. Its culture must be documented and enriched in order to overcome the prejudices against it among both Jews and non-Jews. The aim is to develop Jewish pride as much as to defend, in the eyes of governments, the existence of a Jewish national minority with a distinct culture and identity, whose speakers must be protected.

Are the founders of YIVO involved in politics?

This is a complicated question. On the one hand, as we have just seen, the founders supported the recognition of Jews as a national minority in the diaspora. On the other hand, YIVO considered itself an apolitical organization. Its leaders, who directed academic work, believed that in order to conduct objective research, it was necessary to refrain from taking a political position. Furthermore, as an institution seeking to document Jewish culture and collect material in all languages representing all aspects of Jewish life, they need to be neutral. This is all the more delicate given that this period was marked by numerous debates between many political parties. Among the Zionists, some criticized YIVO for not supporting their movement. Similarly, among the socialists, some voices criticized YIVO for not being more closely aligned with their struggles. Even within the institution itself, members of the Bund demanded greater commitment to socialism and, especially after 1933, a public commitment by YIVO to side with the pro-communist camp in order to unite in the fight against fascism. At the same time, serious friction arose with Jewish research institutes in the Soviet Union. Initially, these institutes collaborated with YIVO, whose founder, Nokhem Shtif, even left in 1926 to work at a Soviet-supported research institute in Kiev. YIVO began by inviting Soviet Jewish speakers to Vilna. But as the political situation in the USSR hardened, it became impossible to maintain these friendly ties. Soviet institutions of Jewish studies attacked YIVO and its apolitical stance. For their part, YIVO leaders were determined to stick to their principles: no affiliation with any political party or movement, in the name of academic integrity. From the second half of the 1930s onwards, in response to pressure, they defended their desire to fight fascism through research, producing works that contradicted Nazi racial propaganda.

 

The Soviet view of YIVO In the Soviet Union, Jewish scientific research experienced an initial period of optimism in the 1920s. The state provided it with considerable support, as it did other minority cultures. However, the tide turned and it was severely weakened by purges and executions in the mid-1930s. It was then, under these conditions of terror and repression, that Soviet Jewish academics attempted to prove their loyalty to the cause by waging an ideological campaign against their Western counterparts. They targeted YIVO, the Jewish Scientific Institute in Poland, and its Yiddishist members, with whom they nevertheless shared intellectual concerns and a common scholarly language. In the early 1930s, mirroring Stalin’s growing mistrust of the West, they came to accuse their Yiddishist counterparts of posing a threat to the Soviet Union. They referred to them as the “Jewish section of the fascist movement,” which deliberately promoted “Jewish nationalism,” “chauvinism,” and “traditionalism” in order to divert the Jewish proletariat from the class struggle and facilitate its enslavement by the bourgeoisie. In 1930, a pamphlet denouncing the Yiddishist supporters of capitalism was published in Minsk: Fashizirter yidishism, “Fascist Yiddishism.”

 

What happened to YIVO when World War II broke out?

Without going into too much detail, let’s summarize the situation as follows. When World War II broke out, Max Weinreich, one of the three main leaders of YIVO in Vilnius, was on his way to an international conference and stopped in Copenhagen, where he was stranded. Meanwhile, in Vilnius, the Soviets initially occupied the territory, then left and transferred the Vilnius region to an independent country: Lithuania. Suddenly, YIVO was no longer in Poland, but in Lithuania, a neutral state in the war. At first, it was hoped that the institute could continue to operate, which it did for a year. But there was hesitation: should Weinreich return to Vilna? Or should he go to New York, where there was already a large branch of YIVO? Should the institute’s headquarters be moved with him? After a year, the Soviets returned and occupied Vilnius. Finally, nearly a year later, the Nazis invaded the city during their advance eastward. In the meantime, Weinreich had decided to leave for New York, which became the new headquarters of YIVO. This was supposed to be a temporary move for the duration of the war, but it became permanent. I recommend the works of Kalman Weiser^[1] and David Fishman^[2] to understand this period.

So the headquarters moved from Vilnius to New York. What happened during the war at the original YIVO in Lithuania? What became of its employees and collections?

During the Soviet occupation, the books and archives remained untouched, but YIVO ceased to function as an independent institute and was incorporated into the Soviet bureaucracy. When the Nazis arrived, however, everything was turned upside down. They had a systematic plan to plunder Jewish property throughout Europe: archives, libraries, museums, private collections, synagogues, religious objects… As soon as they occupied Vilnius in the summer of 1941, they set up several sorting centers, where they forced Jewish employees to work and sent all the Jewish property they had looted. The YIVO building was used as one of these sorting centers. Its employees, along with other forced laborers, were tasked with sorting not only the institute’s collections, but also goods brought in from elsewhere. The Nazis demanded that they select a small portion of these items to send to Germany. They planned to build a museum after the war to show the world what Jewish culture was like, once the Jews had been exterminated. The rest of the material was destroyed or recycled.

It was at this point that some YIVO employees played a heroic role…

Led by the famous poets and partisans Avrom Sutzkever^[3] and Shmerke Kaczerginski^[4], some of the forced laborers gathered in the YIVO building created a “paper brigade.” They stole materials (books, archives, works of art, etc.) that the Nazis planned to destroy and smuggled them into the ghetto, where they were buried in underground passages, or to non-Jewish Lithuanians who helped them outside the ghetto. This “smuggling” was possible because they were forced to live in the ghetto but were transferred every day to the YIVO building, located in another part of the city, to work. This gave them opportunities to come into contact with Lithuanians who agreed to cooperate, or to bring objects back to the ghetto in the evening.

After the war, the YIVO in Vilnius ceased to exist. The Jewish communities of Eastern Europe had been destroyed. The YIVO moved permanently to New York. Who frequented the institute at that time?

In the postwar years, it was a destination of choice for Yiddish writers, activists from Yiddish schools, anyone active in the Yiddish world, as well as many war survivors who came there to reconnect. When I worked at YIVO in the 1990s, there were still many Jews from Eastern Europe who spoke Yiddish and came to the library to read newspapers, magazines, and the latest publications. In addition, YIVO has always attracted researchers and genealogists from around the world, thanks to its collections, which are the largest in the world on Yiddish culture, literature, and the history of Yiddish-speaking Jews. Today, there are dozens of courses that attracts students, so when you walk around YIVO in New York, you come across students, researchers… For 50 years, YIVO offered a summer school for learning Yiddish. Today, this option exists in many other centers, in Tel Aviv, Warsaw, Paris, etc., but when YIVO started, it was the only one and attracted everyone who wanted to learn the language.

Can you describe the typical YIVO Yiddish student today?

There have always been several categories. On the one hand, there are master’s and doctoral students who want to learn Yiddish for academic reasons, for their studies. Musicians and actors who want to sing in Yiddish or write their own songs in that language. More recently, two new groups have emerged. First, younger students who have just started college, or even high school students, who are interested in Yiddish. This interest is new and growing. And then there is a second group of much older students, generally retirees, who have the time to do things that interest them. These are often people who heard Yiddish in their childhood and regret that the language was not passed on to them. They want to regain this part of their culture now that they have the time.

What do you think explains the new interest in Yiddish among very young people, high school students, and undergraduates?

I would say that for some of them, this interest is linked to their views on Israel, or on the situation in Israel. Perhaps the Jewish education they received in Jewish schools or Jewish youth movements was focused on Israel and support for Zionism. When they become disillusioned with Israel, some of them see Yiddish culture as an alternative. For example, they are interested in Bundism, a socialist Yiddishist political movement that was anti-Zionist. In my opinion, this is a limited view of Yiddish culture, but it is something that appeals to some students. However, there are broader motivations among young American girls and boys who do not necessarily wish to oppose Zionism, but who are dissatisfied with the cultural content and Jewish identity in which they were raised. They find that this mainstream American Jewish culture is not really connected to the history of their families and ancestors. They have been taught about the Holocaust, but they want to know what existed before the death and destruction. For a long time, there have also been many students from Eastern Europe who are interested in the fact that their countries were once places marked by cultural and ethnic diversity. For example, young Polish students discover that pre-war Polish society included Jewish, Ukrainian, and German minorities. They are interested in this narrative because it differs from the one put forward by the far right. They are less frequently seen in YIVO classes now, partly because of the war in Ukraine, but also for a much happier reason: there are now Yiddish classes in Warsaw, so it is no longer necessary to travel to New York.

What is the purpose of YIVO today, when Yiddish is no longer, by far, the language of the majority of the Jewish population?

Once again, I recommend Kalman Weiser’s work on this subject. Of course, the postwar leaders of YIVO, Max Weinreich foremost among them, had to deal with a profound change in circumstances. YIVO was created as an institute for the Jewish masses, not for a handful of intellectuals. But after the war, Yiddish was no longer the language spoken by the majority of the Jewish population. YIVO changed its working language to English, particularly in its publications. The aim was to make its work accessible to an audience interested in this culture.

Today, Yiddish is spoken mainly within Hasidic communities, which are very present in New York. Does YIVO also cater to this audience?

That’s an interesting question. Yiddish is indeed the first language of these Hasidic communities. When I worked at YIVO in the 1990s, I sometimes saw Hasidim sitting in the reading room consulting library or archive materials. YIVO wanted to try to collect the material produced in Yiddish by these communities, but there is so much of it that I doubt they will ever manage to gather it all.

Is there a difference between the Yiddish taught at YIVO and the Yiddish spoken by the Hasidim?

When it was founded, YIVO produced a standardized language, called klal yidish, so that it could be taught in schools and used in textbooks. This standardization has since been constantly criticized from various quarters. Recently, linguists have begun to take an interest in Hasidic Yiddish and have formulated new criticisms of klal Yiddish: if the majority of Yiddish speakers, i.e., these Hasidic communities, speak according to different rules, shouldn’t YIVO take this into account? As a result, the institute now offers courses on this topic. There is a growing recognition that these communities should not be ignored. I think there is still a lot that could be done—not necessarily to attract a large Hasidic audience to the YIVO library—but to document their culture and reach out to the Hasidim. It should be noted that the digitization of works makes all secular Yiddish literature accessible to many members of these communities. They are a minority within their groups who are interested in this, but in absolute terms, due to the rapid growth of the Hasidic population, their numbers are increasing.

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Interview conducted by Macha Fogel