The YIVO Institute Launches New Online Exhibition

Stories from the Archives: Jewish Immigration to America 

(New York NY) - The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (YIVO) announces the launch of a new online exhibition, Stories from the Archives: Jewish Immigration to America, featuring artifacts from its extensive migration collections.

The experience of new immigrants in the United States and the controversies about immigration are not new phenomena. This exhibition looks at immigration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  In particular, it covers the waves of Jewish immigrants who came to America between the 1870s to the early 1920s, Jewish refugees from the Holocaust in the 1940s and survivors of the Holocaust after World War II, and Soviet Jews who came in the 1960s-1980s.

These stories are told through photographs, documents, music, and radio programs, as well as quotes from memoirs.  As the introduction to the exhibition suggests: Every immigrant has a unique story and every piece of paper, every photograph in YIVO’s immigration and migration collections is a gateway to those stories.

The exhibit also features a collection of Yiddish cartoons from the 1920s that protest US immigration quotas that harshly restricted Jewish immigration.

Visit the exhibition.

Through YIVO Online Exhibitions and YIVO’s other digital initiatives, YIVO is working to enable worldwide online access to its unique collections.

Stories from the Archives is part of Carnegie Hall’s Migrations: The Making of America Festival.

About YIVO

The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research is dedicated to the preservation and study of the history and culture of East European Jewry worldwide. For nearly a century, YIVO has pioneered new forms of Jewish scholarship, research, education, and cultural expression. Our public programs and exhibitions, as well as online and on-site courses, extend our outreach to a global community. The YIVO Archives contains 24 million unique items and YIVO’s Library has over 400,000 volumes—the single largest resource for the study of East European Jewish life in the world. yivo.org / yivo.org/the-whole-story