World History: New Digital Archive on Jewish Life in Poland Now Available Online

From the YIVO Institute:

The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research is delighted to announce the launch of the YIVO Digital Archive on Jewish Life in Poland, at polishjews.yivoarchives.org. The website provides access to thousands of digitized documents, manuscripts, photographs, artworks, films, and audio recordings relating to the rich and vibrant Jewish community in Poland before World War II. Conceived as an educational experience and a research tool, the new website has been developed to serve a broad audience of both the general public and scholars.
The website provides access to thousands of digitized documents, manuscripts, photographs, artworks, films, and audio recordings relating to the rich and vibrant Jewish community in Poland before World War II. Conceived as an educational experience and a research tool, the new website has been developed to serve a broad audience of both the general public and scholars.
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The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research was founded in Vilna, Poland, in 1925, and relocated to New York City in 1940 with the mission to study the thousand-year history of Jewish life in Eastern Europe and Russia in all its aspects: language, history, religion, folkways and material culture. Today YIVO’s Archive and Library preserve the largest and most significant collection of materials on this subject in the world, and our mission remains the same.

Direct to YIVO Digital Archive on Jewish Life in Poland

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The site is searchable by keyword and features galleries that can easily be browsed.
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During World War II, the Nazis invaded Vilna, Poland, where YIVO was located, and looted its collection, intending to send it to Frankfurt to create an institute for study of the Jewish people. After the war, the U.S. Army helped YIVO recover the materials that had survived in chaotic disarray (with pages crumbled, torn, or severed from a manuscript and scattered), and 400 crates were shipped to New York.
Right now the portal makes about 4,000 pages of documents accessible. YIVO expects over the next seven years to post a total of 1.5 million pages of documents from its New York collection and what remains in the former Vilna now Vilnius, Lithuania.

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