<div dir="ltr"><h1 id="gmail-headline" class="gmail-headline" style="max-width:574.057px">A Trove of Yiddish Artifacts Rescued From the Nazis, and Oblivion</h1>
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<p class="gmail-byline-dateline"><span class="gmail-byline">By <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/by/joseph-berger" title="More Articles by JOSEPH BERGER"><span class="gmail-byline-author">JOSEPH BERGER</span></a></span><time class="gmail-dateline" datetime="2017-10-19T12:56:25-04:00">OCT. 18, 2017</time>
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<figcaption class="gmail-caption">
<span class="gmail-caption-text">A pinkas, or a kind of
registry, of the Lomde Shas Society in Lithuania from 1836, one of the
documents rescued from the Nazis and soon to be displayed at the YIVO
Institute for Jewish Research in Manhattan.</span>
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Kevin Hagen for The New York Times </span>
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<p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content" id="gmail-story-continues-1">In
one of their odder and more chilling moves, the Nazis occupying
Lithuania once collected Yiddish and Hebrew books and documents, hoping
to create a reference collection about a people they intended to
annihilate.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">Even stranger, they appointed Jewish intellectuals and poets to select the choicest pearls for study.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">These
workers, assigned to sift through a major Jewish library in Vilna,
Vilnius in Lithuanian, ended up hiding thousands of books and papers
from the Nazis, smuggling them out under their clothing, and squirreling
them away in attics and underground bunkers.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">In
1991, a large part of the collection was found in the basement of a
Vilnius church, and were hailed as important artifacts of Jewish
history.</p><figure id="gmail-media-100000005501779" class="gmail-media gmail-photo embedded gmail-layout-large-horizontal gmail-media-100000005501779 gmail-ratio-tall">
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<span class="gmail-caption-text">The former church of St. George in Vilnius where a trove of Yiddish documents had been hidden in the basement.</span>
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Andrej Vasilenko for The New York Times </span>
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<p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">But months ago curators at the <a href="https://www.yivo.org/" title="Institute website">YIVO Institute for Jewish Research</a>
in Manhattan, the successor to the Vilnius library, were told that
another trove, totaling 170,000 pages, had been found, somehow
overlooked in the same church basement.</p> <a class="gmail-visually-hidden gmail-skip-to-text-link" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/18/arts/a-trove-of-yiddish-artifacts-rescued-from-the-nazis-and-oblivion.html?_r=0#story-continues-2">Continue reading the main story</a>
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<p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content" id="gmail-story-continues-3">These documents, experts say, are even more valuable and compelling. Among the finds:</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">• Five dog-eared notebooks of poetry by <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1982/07/01/obituaries/chaim-grade-yiddish-novelist-and-poet-on-the-holocaust-dies.html" title="Article on Grade">Chaim Grade</a>, considered along with Isaac Bashevis Singer as one of the leading Yiddish novelists of the mid-20th century.</p>
<p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content" id="gmail-story-continues-4">• Two letters by Sholem Aleichem, the storyteller whose tales of Tevye the Milkman formed the core of “Fiddler on the Roof.”</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">• A postcard written by Marc Chagall, the Jewish modernist painter.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">“These
are gold,” said David E. Fishman, a professor of Jewish history at the
Jewish Theological Seminary, who traveled to Vilnius in July at YIVO’s
behest to assess the trove’s importance. He came back with the sort of
enthusiasm one might find in an explorer who has just discovered unknown
lands.</p><figure id="gmail-media-100000005501769" class="gmail-media gmail-photo embedded gmail-layout-large-vertical gmail-media-100000005501769">
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<span class="gmail-caption-text">The autobiography of a fifth grader, Bebe Epshtein, with her picture, was among the items found in the church basement.</span>
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Kevin Hagen for The New York Times </span>
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<p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">A
selection of 10 items from the newly found literary manuscripts,
letters, diaries, synagogue record books, theater posters and ephemera
will go on display on Oct. 24 at YIVO headquarters on West 16th Street.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">In
interviews, Mr. Fishman and Jonathan Brent, YIVO’s executive director,
discussed other findings, including, an early poem by Abraham Goldfaden,
the father of the flourishing Yiddish theater in Europe and on
Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and 10 poems handwritten in the Vilna
ghetto by <a href="http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft5q2nb3z7&brand=ucpress" title="Poems by Sutzkever">Abraham Sutzkever</a>,
among the greatest Yiddish poets. In one poem, Sutzkever expresses his
fear that “Death is rushing, riding on a bullet-head/To tear apart in me
my brightest dream.”</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">Mr.
Brent and his staff said they were just as excited by more quotidian
items like scripts of “Sherlock Holmes” and other popular entertainments
that delighted prewar Jews and an astronomical guide with a set of
dials to calculate when religious holidays should fall, given variations
in the lengths of Jewish lunar months. A 1933 “autobiography” by a
malnourished fifth grader, Bebe Epshtein, describes how her parents
forced her to eat by telling her beguiling stories. When “I would open
my mouth,” she wrote, “they would pour in food.”</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">Many
of the items, the experts said, offer glimpses into the hardscrabble
everyday lives of the Jews of Eastern Europe when the region, not Israel
or the Lower East Side, was the center of the Jewish world.</p> <a class="gmail-visually-hidden gmail-skip-to-text-link" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/18/arts/a-trove-of-yiddish-artifacts-rescued-from-the-nazis-and-oblivion.html?_r=0#story-continues-5">Continue reading the main story</a>
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<span class="gmail-caption-text">A collection of Yiddish
artifacts was recently discovered in the basement of St. George’s, a
former church in Vilnius, Lithuania.</span>
<span class="gmail-credit">
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Andrej Vasilenko for The New York Times </span>
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<p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content" id="gmail-story-continues-6">Almost
as intriguing as the cache is the serpentine story of the documents’
rescue and rediscovery, much of which had been known before but which
has been updated with the new find.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">When
the Nazis occupied Lithuania from 1941 to 1944, they were determined to
incinerate or grind up the country’s Jewish collections, particularly
those at YIVO, which from 1925 to 1940 in Vilna was the world’s foremost
library of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. With characteristic
incongruity, though, they decided to save a third of the YIVO collection
for a research center near Frankfurt that would study “the Jewish
question” even if they planned to make sure the Jews would be extinct.
(In Lithuania alone, 90 percent of the prewar Jewish population of
160,000 was murdered.)</p><div id="gmail-story-ad-2" class="gmail-story-ad gmail-ad gmail-ad-placeholder gmail-nocontent gmail-robots-nocontent"><div class="gmail-ad-header"><p>ADVERTISEMENT</p></div>
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<p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content" id="gmail-story-continues-7">They
needed Yiddish speakers to analyze and select the materials, and
deployed 40 ghetto residents like Sutzkever and another raffish poet,
Shmerke Kaczerginski, as slave laborers. Risking death by a firing
squad, this “paper brigade” rescued thousands of books and documents.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">When
the Germans were pushed out of Lithuania by the Soviets, survivors like
Sutzkever spirited some hidden treasures to New York. (The Soviets
frowned on anything evocative of ethnic or religious loyalties.)
Meanwhile, a gentile librarian, Antanas Ulpis, who was assembling the
remnants of the national library in a former church, St. George’s,
stashed stacks of Jewish materials in basement rooms to hide them from
Stalin’s enforcers. He is, as a result, regarded by YIVO as a kind of
Oskar Schindler of document rescue.</p><figure id="gmail-media-100000005501772" class="gmail-media gmail-photo embedded gmail-layout-large-horizontal gmail-media-100000005501772 gmail-ratio-tall">
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<figcaption class="gmail-caption">
<span class="gmail-caption-text">A page from an astronomical
manuscript written and illustrated by Issachar Bee Carmoly in 1731, part
of a forthcoming display at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.</span>
<span class="gmail-credit">
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Kevin Hagen for The New York Times </span>
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<p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">The
bulk of the basement collection — documents totaling 250,000 pages —
was recovered after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">Last
year, the entire basement collection was transferred to the Martynas
Mazvydas National Library of Lithuania, which had reopened in a grand
colonnaded building, and in May officials there informed Mr. Brent, of
the new trove of 170,000 documents. They had been stored in a separate
church basement room and had never been evaluated because none of the
assigned archivists could read Yiddish or Hebrew.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">Lithuania
has chosen to hold onto all the Jewish documents in the library’s
Judaica center as part of its national heritage. But it has allowed YIVO
to digitize them for the use of the general public — and to have select
items to display in Manhattan later this month.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">“It’s
going to take decades for scholars to analyze all of this,” said Mr.
Fishman, who this month published “The Book Smugglers: Partisans, Poets
and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures From the Nazis.”</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">Among
the more mundane curiosities that were salvaged is a weathered
agreement from 1857 between a yeshiva in Vilna and a union of water
carriers.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">What is a water carrier, a Talmud student might ask?</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">In
Vilna at that time, water carriers were needed to deliver buckets of
water to homes from available wells. The ragtag Jewish water carriers
formed a guild, which promised to donate a Torah scroll and a set of
Talmuds to the yeshiva if members were given a room of their own,
rent-free, for worship.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">The
crew that rescued these records largely did not survive the war. Some
34 of the 40 people viewed by experts as having been members of the
“paper brigade” died, according to Mr. Fishman, some in death camps like
Treblinka or in labor camps or in more random fashion. Mr. Kaczerginski
was killed in 1954 in a plane crash in the Andes. Sutzkever had an
illustrious career as a poet in Israel and died at age 96 in 2010. Mr.
Ulpis, who helped save the documents later found in the church basement,
died in 1981.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">from the NYTimes 10/19/17<br></p><br clear="all"><br>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature">**************************************<br>N.b.: Listing on the lgpolicy-list is merely intended as a service to its members<br>and implies neither approval, confirmation nor agreement by the owner or sponsor of the list as to the veracity of a message's contents. Members who disagree with a message are encouraged to post a rebuttal, and to write directly to the original sender of any offensive message. A copy of this may be forwarded to this list as well. (H. Schiffman, Moderator)<br><br>For more information about the lgpolicy-list, go to <a href="https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/" target="_blank">https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/</a><br>listinfo/lgpolicy-list<br>*******************************************</div>
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