NYC

Note: In 2025, YIVO is offering both an in-person and online option for the Summer Program. Students interested in attending the program in New York City must apply to the in-person option. A wide array of activities will be available for both in-person and online Summer Program students.

If the Summer Program is your first encounter with NYC, or even if it isn’t, here are some of our favorite Yiddish, Jewish, and just plain fun things about the city.

The Museum at Eldridge Street. The first Ashkenazi synagogue of its kind in New York, the building is now beautifully restored to help tell the story of the Jews who made their lives on the Lower East Side in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Congress for Jewish Culture. Run by our dear friend, Yiddish actor Shane Baker, the Congress does a little bit of everything: Yiddish book groups and sings, a memorial for murdered Soviet Yiddish writers, and helps bring unpublished Yiddish literature into the world.

The Dorot Division of the New York Public Library. Need something that you (god forbid) can’t find in the YIVO library or archives? The Dorot Division, headed up by a Summer Program alum, is full of Yiddish theater, Jewish cookery, Judaica and more.

The Lower East Side Tenement Museum. Through guided tours and live interpretation, this museum tells the stories of the families that lived in the tenement apartments at 97 Orchard Street.