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The Jury of the Jan Karski and Pola Nirenska Award has the pleasure to announce that Mr. Piotr Matywiecki of Warsaw, Poland was named the recipient of the Karski Award for the year 2014. This annual award was endowed by Prof. Jan Karski in 1992 for an author of published ...

"A woman’s path extends from the stove to the door. / Here in the USSR without God, the woman’s path leads everywhere." Bezbozhnik u stanka (The Godless at the workplace), 1927. On June 16, 2013, Elissa Bemporad spoke at YIVO about her book, BecomingSoviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk (Indiana University Press), a ...

by ROBERTA NEWMAN

On August 29, we posted an article about how YIVO founder Max Weinreich and his son were stranded in Copenhagen in the early days of World War II. In it, the author, Bent Blüdnikow, wrote also about the small community of Yiddish-speaking Jews who took the Weinreichs in and about how these Jews, including Blüdnikow’s grandfather, Abraham Krakowsky, stayed in touch with YIVO over the years.

After the war, when the Danish Jews returned from Sweden, where they had been evacuated by the Danish underground and thus saved from death at the hands of the Nazis, Krakowsky and others began sending documents chronicling the social, cultural, and religious revival of the community to YIVO. They were zamlers (collectors), members of the worldwide network of volunteers who helped build the collections of the YIVO Archives and Library both before and after World War II.

Here are a few examples of what they sent to YIVO in the late 1940s and 50s, and which can now be found in RG 116 Territorial Collections – Denmark.

Digitization of images by Vital Zajka, YIVO Archives.

In this episode, originally heard on March 7, 1965, YIVOhistorian and archivist Zosa Szajkowski talks about the importance of collecting news of current events: “How what is news today is tomorrow’s history.” Two of the many YIVO archival collections with newspaper clippings and first-hand accounts that he mentions are The ...

The YIVO Digital Archive on Jewish Life in Poland is glowingly reviewed on a website dedicated to the Jewish community of Dnepetrovsk.

In an August 20 article in the Malibu Times, "Malibu Film Archive Gives Light To Anne Frank Documentary," filmmaker Paula Fouce speaks of the importance of YIVO’s Holocaust collections, including the recently discovered Otto Frank file. (The article includes some inaccuracies, including the statement that YIVO has spent "$7 million dollars" on a "research tool for Holocaust survivors and their testimonies."

YIVO is mentioned in an NBC News report, "Meet the Polish Catholic Devoted to Helping American Jews," and in an essay by Peter N. Miller in The Chronicle of Higher Education, "How Objects Speak."

In 1939, Max Weinreich, his wife Regina, and their son Uriel-Eliezer were stranded in Copenhagen, Denmark because of the outbreak of WWII.

Untitled poem by Yitsḥak Katzenelson, n.d. Dedicated to Khayke Kahan, "my friend from Korelitz." "Of everything . . . / Of everything that I once had / There remains to me a heart tired and weary. . . ." Yiddish. RG 108, Manuscripts Collection, F73.12. (YIVO) Poet and playwright Yitzkhak Katzenelson (1885-1944) was known chiefly for ...

Roberta Newman interviewed Hy Wolfe, director of the CYCO Bookstore.

This broadcast from February 28, 1965 presents excerpts from a paperdelivered at YIVO’s annual conference, which had taken place the month before. As Yedies reported at the time, Joseph Gar, a student of “the history of the recent catastrophe” (note that this was before the term “Holocaust” came into general ...

On August 12, 1952, thirteen prominent Soviet Jews were executed in Moscow, among them the poets Itsik Fefer, Dovid Hofshteyn, Leyb Kvitko, and Peretz Markish; and the novelist Dovid Bergelson.

Every year, Jewish communities around the world hold commemorations on what has become known as the "Night of the Murdered Poets." This year, on Tuesday, August 12, at 6:30 pm, the Congress for Jewish Culture, the Jewish Labor Committee, and the Workmen's Circle will present a free memorial concert at YIVO.

Dutch soprano Sofie Van Lier and pianist Dimitri Dover will perform in a program that will include the following works: