YIVO in the News/Staff Notes – February 2014

A number of YIVO public programs received press coverage. YIVO’s February 14th roundtable discussion on Lithuanian-Jewish relations, “Unresolved History: Jews and Lithuanians After the Holocaust,” is reported on by Ralph Seliger in the 3-part article “Israel & Lithuania: Parallel Dueling 'Narratives',” on the Partners for Progressive Israel Blog. Part III of the article can be read here.

Watch video of the roundtable.

An article on Steven Zipperstein’s January 6 lecture at YIVO, “Rethinking Kishinev: How a Riot Changed 20th Century Jewish History,” appears on the blog Mondoweiss, where it sparked an extensive and lively exchange of comments by readers.

The Forverts reported on the February 6 Yiddish lecture by Michael Steinlauf and program moderated by Eddy Portnoy , “Y.L. Peretz in a Time of Revolution.”

YIVO Senior Photo and Film Archivist Krysia Fisher served as co-curator of an exhibition of photographs by Menachem Kipnis that opened at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw in early February. The photographs in the exhibition are from YIVO’s Menachem Kipnis collection, the only surviving archive of his work.

YIVO was mentioned in the announcement for a panel discussion on avant-garde architect Lazar Khidekel, which will take place at the Center for Architecture in New York. In April 2013, YIVO mounted an exhibition of Khidekel’s work, Floating Worlds and Future Cities: The Genius of Lazar Khidekel, Suprematism, and the Russian Avant-Garde.

On February 24, 2014, Russian Jewish pianist Evgeny Kissin played pieces by forgotten Jewish composers and recited Yiddish poetry at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, in a program that he premiered on May 7, 2013 at YIVO’s 12th Annual Heritage Gala in New York.

Jenny Levison pays tribute to the late Chana Mlotek, YIVO’s longtime music archivist, at Jewniverse in a piece entitled “NYC’s Beloved Yiddishe Music Maven.”

Read more about Chana.

The opening of George Clooney’s Hollywood film, Monuments Men, has sparked many articles and blog-posts about the history of this special program of the Allied Forces in World War II, which was dedicated to rescuing cultural treasures that had been looted by the Nazis. The role of the Monuments Men in saving YIVO’s collections was the focus of a piece by Eddy Portnoy in the Forward, “How Real Monuments Men Saved Priceless YIVO Yiddish Treasure.” Portnoy’s piece was picked up on by other writers, who mention YIVO’s connection with the Monuments Men in articles, including Laurie Baron’s review of the movie in San Diego Jewish World and pieces focusing on Colonel Seymour Pomrenze, who played a leading role in the rescue of YIVO’s collections, including “A grandson commemorates real-life Monument Man” (CNN) and “Woman’s Father was Monuments Man” (Sun Sentinel). Melanie J. Meyers piece in the Center for Jewish History blog, “Mapping the Offenbach Archival Depot: A Collaborative Endeavor,” also writes about Pomrenze’s work to recover YIVO collections.

A profile on Eli Broad on Philanthropy Roundtable begins with a description of the YIVO project funded by the Broad Foundation in 2006: the preservation of the archives of the Hebrew Actors Union and an exhibition based on the materials.

The most recent issue of the journal East European Jewish Affairs is dedicated to research on the Jewish Labor Bund, with many of the pieces involving extensive research in YIVO’s Bund Archives.

A profile in The Villager of Timothy Naftali, the new director of NYU’s Tamiment Library mentions the research he conducted at YIVO on the Romanian Jewish roots of his family. A profile on documentary filmmaker Paula Fouce discusses the research she conducted in the YIVO Archives for her film No Asylum, about Anne Frank and the lack of haven for Jews seeking to escape Europe in the 1930s-1940s.