Fira Bramson, 1924 – 2016, z”l

YIVO mourns the passing of Fira Bramson (Estera Bramson-Alperniene), longtime librarian at the Jewish section of the National Library of Lithuania and lifelong friend of YIVO.

Fira was among the few archivists and librarians in Lithuania knowledgeable enough to work with Jewish collections in the post-World War II period and played a key role in safeguarding the survival of Jewish books, periodicals, and documents. When remnants of YIVO’s prewar archives and library were discovered in Vilnius in the late 1980s after having been hidden for forty years, Fira helped shepherd YIVO representatives through their encounters with the collections and with Lithuanian librarians and officials.

She was one of the last living members of the generation of Lithuanian Jews that survived the Holocaust. Born in Kaunas and a member of the prestigious Bramson family, Fira was educated at the Yiddish-language Sholem Aleichem Gymnasium and spent World War II as a refugee in Kazakhstan. She lost her entire family in the Holocaust. After the war, she settled in Vilnius.

In 2009, in honor of her 85th birthday, the National Library of Lithuania published a Lithuanian/Yiddish volume of her articles, Prie Judaikos Lobio – Baym oytser fun yidish.

Fira belonged to the relatively small subset of those survivors who chose to remain in Eastern Europe for the rest of their lives and who retained their connection with and devotion to Jewish culture  and Yiddish. Her life encompassed both the traumas and achievements of the Jewish world of the twentieth century and she will be greatly mourned and missed by her colleagues and friends at YIVO.

Read a Yiddish obituary in the Forverts.