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YIVO celebrates the 120th anniversary of the founding of the Jewish Labor Bund, the socialist movement which has figured so prominently in the history of East European and World Jewry.

The program will consist of formal presentations on Bund history, performances of songs and poetry (in English and Yiddish) and commentary by contemporary activists.

The Bund was the first modern Jewish political party in Eastern Europe, and, arguably, the strongest Jewish party in Poland on the eve of World War II. Examine the Bund’s history, the development of its program, and the reasons which underlie both its rise and decline.

This talk will explore the history of the Bund, and its ideological development, and will attempt to explain both the reasons for the Bund’s success, and the party’s limitations.

by ROBERTA NEWMAN

“No one has ever written about it. No one has ever known about it." Swedish labor historian Håkan Blomqvist pointed to the documents from the Bund Archives spread out in front of him in the YIVO Archives. “This is an aspect of Swedish history that has gone unexamined.”

Blomqvist, a professor of philosophy in history and the director of the Institute of Contemporary History at Södertörn University in Flemingsberg (a suburb of Stockholm), Sweden was at YIVO last week on one of the research trips he has been taking for several years, since he first learned of the existence of materials at YIVO documenting the Jewish Labor Bund in Sweden. A scholar who has written several books on Swedish labor history with a focus on nationalism and antisemitism related to the Swedish labor movement, he initially came to YIVO in 2010 to research those topics and was then alerted to the Bund materials by YIVO archivist Leo Greenbaum. This most recent trip was funded by a grant from The Foundation for Baltic and Eastern European Studies. He is being assisted in his research by Dr. Paul Glasser, former Dean of YIVO’s Max Weinreich Center.

Irene Kronhill Pletka, Vice Chairman of the YIVO Board, was honored at the 2018 Gala and pledged a $1 million gift to kick start support for the Bund Digitization Project.

Today we are witnessing a revival of the ideas of the Jewish Labor Bund, an organization which had been a powerful force in Russian and Polish Jewish communities during the first half of the 20th century. This panel, made up of activists and cultural workers ranging in age from their 20s to their 80s, will discuss what they see in Bundist ideas, and how it affects their current political and cultural practices.

YIVO recently received a collection of rare photographs taken by Jacob Rosofsky/Reshefsky, secretary of the (illegal) Bund in Moyzr, who was sentenced to exile in Archangelsk from 1903-1905.

Among the materials being digitized as part of the Jewish Labor and Political Archive is the final letter of Shmuel Zygielbojm, a member of the Bund’s Central Committee.

The Congress for Jewish Culture, Friends of the Bund, Jewish Labor Committee, the Workers Circle, and YIVO join together to commemorate and remember the bravery of the partisans of the Warsaw Ghetto. This event takes place in Warsaw Ghetto Memorial Plaza in Riverside Park, NYC.