YIVO Vilna Online Collections project

From the announcement by Jonathan Brent:

"Take a moment to open vilnacollections.yivo.org on your smartphone or computer. You will find The Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Online Collections that comprise the YIVO archive and library looted by the Nazis during World War II. Some of it came to YIVO in NYC after the War; the rest remained in Lithuania and was discovered in 1991. With our Lithuanian partners YIVO is digitizing 1.3 million pages of documents and 12,200 books that include rabbinical texts, diaries, letters, communal records, literary manuscripts, photographs, Yiddish theater, eye-witness accounts of pogroms and the Holocaust, and much more.

The Vilna Collections project website unites our treasures in Lithuania with those in NYC for the first time since 1941. In the search bar, type in some individual, place, book or event you may wish to examine. Though images are daily being added onto the website, you will shortly find entries with attachments of “digitized files.” Open a file and you will be able to explore the lost world of East European and Russian Jewry in ways never before possible—as will anyone else around the globe. $700,000 is still needed to complete this project, but launching this website now helps us realize its historic importance for all who seek the meaning of who we are as a people."

 

From the website:

 

"The Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Online Collections project is an international project to preserve, digitize, and virtually reunite YIVO’s prewar library and archival collections located in New York City and Vilnius, Lithuania, through a dedicated web portal. The project will also digitally reconstruct the historic, private Strashun Library of Vilna, one of the great prewar libraries of Europe.

This project is a partnership between the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, the Lithuanian Central State Archives, the Martynas MaÅžvydas National Library of Lithuania, and the Wroblewski Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences, and includes the cataloging, conservation, and digitization of documents and books in both New York and Vilnius.  

In May 2017, some 170,000 pages of previously unknown documents, lost to history for almost 70 years, were discovered in Vilnius, significantly expanding the scope of our project."