Overview of Archival Collections

The YIVO Archives holds manuscripts, letters, and other documents; printed ephemera; sheet music; posters; artworks and artifacts; photographs, film and video; and sound recordings. (Books and periodicals are held by the YIVO Library.)

The estimated 24,000,000 items in the YIVO Archives are written in over 10 languages. The approximately 1,900 collections (record groups) that make up the YIVO Archives occupy over 17,000 linear feet. They cover a wide range of topics relating to Jewish history and culture around the world but concentrate on four main areas: East European Jewish history; history of the Jews in the United States; Yiddish language, literature, and culture (including significant collections on the Yiddish theater and Yiddish press); and the Holocaust.

Among the highlights of the YIVO Archives collections are:

• The papers of important cultural and political figures, such as Abraham Cahan, Horace Kallen, William Gropper, and Rose Pesotta. YIVO has the world’s most extensive archive of the papers of Yiddish writers, such as Sholem Asch, Chaim Grade, Kadia Molodowsky, David Pinsky, and Morris Rosenfeld.
• The Otto Frank File, which includes personal correspondence and official records documenting Anne Frank’s father’s desperate attempts to secure American visas before going into hiding with his family in 1942.
• Manuscripts and letters from iconic historical figures, such as Sholem Aleichem, Albert Einstein, Sh. An-ski, Simon Dubnow, Marc Chagall, Emma Goldman, and the Rothschild family.
• Records of Jewish organizations from prewar Europe, such as the Hevra Mefitsei Haskalah and the Vaad Heyeshivot, and from the United States, such as HIAS, the American Jewish Committee, the Workmen’s Circle, and the Hebrew Actors’ Union.
• Communal record books (pinkasim) of Jewish communities in Poland, Russia, Ukraine, and Lithuania.
• The archives of the American Yiddish press, such as the Der Tog –Morgn zhurnal (The Day-Morning Journal), Freie Arbeiter Stimme (Free Voice of Labor), and the Morgn Frayhayt (Morning Freiheit).
• Original materials from the Holocaust, including documents and photographs from the Lodz, Warsaw, and Vilna Ghettos; eye-witness testimonies and diaries; and the records of Nazi agencies. Large collections related to Jewish life in Displaced Persons camps in Germany, Austria, and Italy immediately after the Holocaust. YIVO’s Holocaust Archive is the largest North American repository of original documents on the Holocaust.
• Rabbinic manuscripts, such as proceedings of the rabbinical court of Metz for 1771-1790; records of the rabbinical court, Frankfurt am Main, 1722-1795; and works by Ezekiel ben Yehudah (Nodah B'yehudah), Abraham Tiktin, Gedaliah Tiktin, Israel Joshua Trunk, Abraham Abusch Lissa of Leszno, Meir Loeb ben Jehiel Michael Malbim, Meir Simhah Ha-Kohen of Dvinsk.
• Records of the Jewish community of Salonika and the research papers of Linguist and folklorist William Milwitzky,  who traveled through the Balkans in 1898-1899, collecting linguistic, literary and folkloric data relating to Ladino (Judesmo).
• Materials about more than 1,000 landsmanshaftn (mutual aid societies founded by immigrants).
• The world’s largest collection of photographs and home movies of prewar Jewish life in Eastern Europe.
• The Max and Frieda Weinstein Archive of YIVO Sound Recordings, containing more than 15,000 commercial recordings, includes original field recordings produced by ethnomusicologists, and collectors of folk and Hasidic music.
• Playscripts, playbills, photographs, posters, set designs, music, and costumes related to Yiddish theater around the world.
• The Archives of the Jewish Labor Bund, documenting Jews in socialist, labor, and trade union movements. In 1992, YIVO acquired the Bund Archives, one of the foremost Jewish collections specializing in the history of the socialist and labor movements. Founded in Geneva by the Jewish socialist party commonly known as the “Bund," the Archives was transferred to Berlin in 1919. In 1933, with the rise of the Nazi Party, the Bund Archives was smuggled over the border into France. The books and documents were confiscated by the Germans during the occupation period, but survived the war. The Archives was brought to the United States in 1951.
  
  The Bund Archives contain not only the official records of the Jewish Labor Bund (as the Bund is officially known in English), but also important documents on the history of the revolutionary movement in Tsarist Russia; the socialist, anarchist, territorialist, and labor movements in both Europe and the United States; Yiddish culture; and the Holocaust.
  
  Books and periodicals received from the Bund are now a separate collection in the YIVO Library: the Bund Library collection.
• YIVO holds the case files of the National Desertion Bureau, an agency which was organized in 1905 to provide assistance to Jewish immigrant women who had been deserted by their husbands. You can view instructions on requesting National Desertion Bureau case files here.

For a detailed listing of collections in the YIVO Archives, consult the online Guide to the YIVO Archives. Information on YIVO’s archival collections are also searchable in the Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC) of the Center for Jewish History. Selected digital images from the YIVO Archives can be found on YIVO’s special presentation websites, as well as in the OPAC.