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On December 9, the Embassy of Lithuania to the United States held a special event to celebrate an extraordinary journey of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research which will mark its 100th anniversary next year.

Thanking YIVO for the crucial work over the last Centennial, Lithuania’s Ambassador Audra Plepytė emphasized the importance of YIVO’s work in preserving Lithuania’s prewar history and culture obscured during the 50 years of soviet occupation following World War II. “Today we celebrate the history of YIVO and the bravery of the people who heroically preserved the documents keeping so many stories of the past alive. It is thanks to you that the rich history of Litvaks survived to this day. This is an enormous part of our history and common heritage,” noted Ambassador Plepytė.

At the Embassy-organized event, YIVO’s Executive Director & CEO Jonathan Brent presented the history of YIVO’s establishment, survival under Nazi rule, and the extensive collection of YIVO’s treasures saved from the Holocaust. In 2015, YIVO’s Executive Director & CEO Jonathan Brent initiated an international Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Online Collections project, a partnership between the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, the Lithuanian Central State Archives, the Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania, and the Wroblewski Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences to digitally reunite newly found documents with its collection in New York, through a special online platform.

Jonathan Brent emphasized the significance of YIVO's strong ties and partnerships with Lithuania: “The memory of YIVO’s roots in Lithuania give depth and texture to our work today.  It is essential to our historical mission, our ethos, and character, and we profoundly value the many partnerships with Lithuanian institutions we have built over the past 15 years that have led to the continual widening of the understanding of Eastern European Jewish history and culture throughout the world”.

Director of the Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania Aušrinė Žilinskienė congratulated YIVO and greeted event participants via video message. In 2017, with the discovery of some more previously unknown documents in the National Library of Lithuania and at the Wroblewski Library, the project's scope expanded significantly. Among those many stories discovered is one of Bebe Epstein’s. An autobiography of Bebe Epstein, a fifth-grade student at Sofia Gurevich school in the 1930s, which was discovered in the basement of a church in Vilnius in 2017 and recovered by YIVO, has been used for exhibitions and educational materials telling the story of the daily life of a Jewish girl during the interwar period.

Founded in 1925 in Vilnius (Vilna in Yiddish) where it amassed a valuable library and archives, YIVO was forced to relocate to New York following the Nazi occupation of Lithuania in 1941. YIVO’s collection was saved from the Nazi destruction by the so-called “Paper Brigade”, made up of a group of poets and scholars in the Vilna Ghetto, who saved numerous cultural treasures, smuggled and hid rare books, and manuscripts. But only a part of YIVO’s collection saved was moved overseas. A significant amount of artifacts stayed hidden in St. George Church in Vilnius until 1988 when it was finally safe to disclose them.

The YIVO Archives and Library represent the single largest and most comprehensive collection of materials on East European Jewish civilization in the world and is used today by historians, filmmakers and journalists, genealogists, schools, and many institutions around the world.