News & Features

Excerpts from an interview with YIVO Executive Director Jonathan Brent in the Forward’s online video, Philip Roth: Angst of a Retiring Novelist, exploring how Roth’s work both reflected and influenced American Jewish identity and culture.

Every month, the YIVO Library receives complimentary copies of books whose content has been drawn in part from research done by the authors in the YIVO Archives and Library. Below is a partial list of books published in 2011-2013.

In September 1950, YIVO announced plans for a new, focused effort to collect artifacts, documents and other materials documenting American Jewish history, specifically the history of the mass immigration of Jews from Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries and the impact that the immigrants were continuing ...

YIVO, in cooperation with the National Library of Lithuania and the Lithuanian Central State Archives (LCSA), is developing a detailed plan for the digitization of its collections in Lithuania, including newly discovered materials at the LCSA.

As we have reported earlier here, on Monday, November 4, 2013, YIVO’s longtime music archivist and Jewish cultural treasure Chana Mlotek passed away. But YIVO also lost another dear friend, Dr. Alfred Moldovan, who died that same day. Many in the Jewish world knew Dr. Moldovan as a major Judaica collector ...

This third episode, which originally aired on April 19, 1964, features host Sheftl Zak interviewing Michael Zylberberg, journalist and YIVO representative in London. Zylberberg, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, discusses Jewish life and Yiddish in London and his work collecting documents and other historical materials. His collection, which deals extensively with Polish and Jewish anti-Nazi resistance, is in the YIVO Archives (Michael Zylberberg, Papers, RG 493).

פֿון איציק גאָטעסמאַן

In Yiddish literature the building of the sukkah was often portrayed with humor - suddenly every Jew becomes an architect! But Dr. Gabrielle A. Berlinger's research on Sukkot in contemporary southern Tel-Aviv shows how the sukkot structures in a struggling community display individual creativity and a variety of expressions of the ritual; all going on as political and social issues of the day intersect with vernacular religion.

דער ענטפֿער אויף דעם העברעיִשן קינדערליד „למה סוכּה זו?" איז מער קאָמפּליצירט ווי מען וואָלט זיך פֿאָרגעשטעלט, לויט דער פֿאָרשונג פֿון ד״ר גבריאלה בערלינגער, אַ מומחה אין פֿאָלקלאָר און פֿאָלק־אַרכיטעקטור, און אַן „אַנדרו־מעלאָן נאָך־דאָקטאָראַט־חבֿר" בײַם „באַרד־גראַדויִר־צענטער". זי האָט עטלעכע יאָר פֿאַרבראַכט אין ישׂראל און עטנאָגראַפֿיש געקוקט אויף די סוכּות אין לאַנד: ווי אַזוי מען בויט זיי, ווער בויט זיי, און וואָס פֿאַר אַ ראָלע זיי שפּילן אין דער משפּחה און קהילה.

As YIVO mourns the passing of our longtime music archivist Chana Mlotek, we look back at what may be the first mention of her in Yedies: News from YIVO, in June 1948, four years after she arrived at YIVO to be secretary to YIVO’s research director Max Weinreich. This article from ...

The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research mourns the death of its longtime music archivist, Chana Mlotek, known worldwide for her expertise on the musical traditions of Jewish Eastern Europe.

Senior Archivist Fruma Mohrer comments, “Chana had every single piece of music from the YIVO Archives at her fingertips: every arrangement, every title, from the 19th century to the present. She was a woman of vast knowledge, and yet was unfailingly unassuming and unpretentious.” The many catalogs and guides to music collections that Chana created at YIVO are used on a daily basis by composers, conductor, performers, folklorists, and musicologists.

Chana (neé Eleanor "Chana" Gordon) was born on April 9, 1922, in New York in a Yiddish-speaking family. She attended the Yiddish High School of the Sholem Aleichem Folk Institute, and was a graduate of Hunter College.

(NEW YORK, November 4, 2013) – The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research announces with sadness the death of its longtime music archivist, Chana Mlotek, known worldwide for her expertise on the musical traditions of Jewish Eastern Europe. Senior Archivist Fruma Mohrer comments, “Chana had every single piece of music from the ...