Daily Podcasts Video Research

100 years collecting Jewish history, 24 million artifacts and only 3 rooms to fit it in

JL;DR SUMMARY The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research's centennial exhibitions, hosted in its modest New York headquarters, showcase a century of Jewish history and culture through a selection of the institution's vast archive of 24 million artifacts. A way out west there was a fella, fella I want to tell you about, fella by the name of Jeff Lebowski. At least, that was the handle his lovin' parents gave him, but he never had much use for it himself. This Lebowski, he called himself the Dude. Now, Dude, that's a name no one would self-apply where I come from. But then, there was a lot about the Dude that didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. And a lot about where he lived, likewise. But then again, maybe that's why I found the place s'durned innarestin'.

JL;DR members get full summaries of all articles in the archive, including this one. Donate & start reading »

Tags

Jewish HistoryHolocaustVilnaYivo InstitutePaper BrigadeZishe BreitbartJewish ArtifactsEastern European JewryStrashun LibraryExhibitions

Places mentioned

Vilnius, Vilnius County, Lithuania
"Banners from the International Ladies Garment Workers Union are on display with homework from children from the Yiddish school system in Vilna (modern-day Vilnius, Lithuania) dated to the 1930s, just a few short years before the children were likely murdered in the Shoah."
New York, United States
"With the Nazi occupation of Vilna, a group called the Paper Brigade was forced into slave labor at the old YIVO headquarters where the peacetime work of cataloging the stuff of Jewish life was warped to a genocidal end: they were now tasked with sorting objects for a planned Institute for Research on the Jewish Question in Frankfurt, devised to study Jewish life after its extermination."
Frankfurt, Hesse, Germany
"With the Nazi occupation of Vilna, a group called the Paper Brigade was forced into slave labor at the old YIVO headquarters where the peacetime work of cataloging the stuff of Jewish life was warped to a genocidal end: they were now tasked with sorting objects for a planned Institute for Research on the Jewish Question in Frankfurt, devised to study Jewish life after its extermination."
Zamość, Lublin, Poland
"A twisted piece of iron tells the story of a Polish man who was once among the most popular Jews in Europe."
Israel
"In the YIVO Institute for Jewish Researchs centennial exhibition, the loop of mangled metal from Breitbarts act shares wallspace with a poster-sized pamphlet advertising the achievements of the Zionist community in pre-state Palestine, which, in one corner, contrasts the trembling Jew of the Diaspora with a strapping halutz, or pioneer."

Support this source

This item was indexed and curated by Cairo, JL;DR's web crawler.
Cairo Item ID 55302
Cairo Source ID 35
Retrieved 2025-06-24 05:30:57 UTC
Curated 2025-06-24 08:31:51 UTC