Browse Archival Collections

Original art works, reproductions, and historical artifacts, including costume and stage designs; political cartoons; and Jewish ceremonial art

Archives of the Bund (Algemeyner Yidisher Arbeter Bund in Lite, Poyln un Rusland - The General Union of Jewish Workers in Lithuania, Poland and Russia), including materials on the history of the Bund, Jewish and general socialist groups, and other political movements

Rare historical documents and research materials from the collection of the great historian Simon Dubnow (1860-1941), seminal scholar of Jewish history in Eastern Europe

Amateur film footage of Jewish communities in Poland from the YIVO Film Archive, digitized with the generous support of the Righteous Persons Foundation and the Steven Spielberg Foundation.

Several thousand 19th-century kvitlekh (written requests to a rabbi asking for a blessing or advice) sent to Rabbi Eliayahu Guttmacher, known as the Tsadik of Graetz

Records of Jewish state schools established in the Russian Empire in 1847 in order to undermine and replace the traditional heder system of education

125 photographs of Jewish life in Poland during the 1930s taken in some 30 communities. Subjects include: occupations such as coach drivers, street peddlers and street musicians, and scenes of life in the streets of Poland's cities and towns.

Records of a landsmanshaft affiliated with the hometown of Makow

Published music and manuscripts: Yiddish and Hebrew folk and art songs; theater music; Holocaust songs; liturgical and Hasidic music; choral music; classical compositions. Materials about Jewish music organizations, choruses, and cantors.

Synagogue seat contracts, brit (circumcision) and marriage registers, school and vocational apprenticeship records, and other documents

Records of the Rabbinical School and Teachers' Institute, one of several Jewish state schools established in the Russian Empire in 1847 in order to undermine and replace the traditional heder system of education

Papers of the historian, writer, lecturer, lexicographer, bibliographer, and editor, including correspondence, materials and notes for articles, and bibliographies

Historical and literary manuscripts belonging to YIVO that were rescued and hidden from the Nazis, including manuscripts by S. An-Ski, Theodor Herzl, Mendele Moykher Sforim, and Sholem Aleichem

Printed materials, posters, correspondence, and fragmentary personal papers and records of institutions related to Polish Jewish life before WWII

Records of an organization that provided financial and spiritual assistance to a network of 70 yeshivot in the five Eastern provinces of Poland

Papers of an Anglo-Jewish diplomat who was a delegate to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and who was involved in the drafting of the minorities treaties

Records and correspondence assembled by scholar Elias Tcherikower, relating to the founding of YIVO, its Executive Committee, and Historical Section; documents about the Historical Commission on Poland in Warsaw

Records of the Yiddish Teachers' Union, a professional association in Vilna which promoted the interests of its member teachers and was ideologically associated with the Yiddish secular school network known as TSYSHO