The YIVO Library in New York: Personal Reflections on Its History and Collections
July 31, 2026
AI Summary
5 min readThe YIVO Library in New York holds about 400,000 volumes, but its real significance is not in its size—it is in how those books got there. The library is a collection of collections, assembled by a small group of extraordinary librarians who operated through war, displacement, and institutional crisis. Zachary Baker, who served as YIVO’s head librarian from 1987 to 1999, traces this history from the founding of YIVO in Vilna in 1925 through its move to New York in 1940 and its decades of growth, survival, and digitization. The story is less about a building or a catalog than about the people who built, saved, and connected the collection to researchers.
The library as a collection of collections
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:00) **Introduction by Alex Weiser** - YIVO's Director of Public Programs opens the centennial lecture series.
- 2 (03:34) **Baker's Overview of the YIVO Library** - The talk will cover the library's collections, notable librarians, and its history in New York since 1940.
- 3 (05:05) **The Vilna Origins and the "Paper Brigade"** - How YIVO's library began in 1925 Berlin and grew in Vilna before the Nazi occupation.
- 4 (07:29) **From Vilna to New York: The Post-War Transfer** - The dramatic recovery of YIVO's Vilna collections after the war.
- 5 (09:22) **Mendel Elkin: The Master Collector** - The remarkable figure who built the YIVO library into a "collection of collections."
- 6 (13:28) **The Post-War Influx: Nazi and Vilna Collections** - Key acquisitions that defined the library's research value.
- 7 (17:18) **The DP Press Collection** - A crucial resource for early Holocaust studies.
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Show Notes
In the mid-1930s a group of New York Yiddishist intellectuals established the Central Jewish Library and Press Archive, whose collections became the nucleus of the YIVO Library when the Institute relocated from Vilna to New York in 1940. Over the succeeding decades, the Library grew by leaps and bounds, thanks to the dedication of its librarians and supporters. It emerged as a “collection of collections,” absorbing the extensive personal libraries of prominent Yiddish writers, scholars, and book collectors. Crucially, after 1945 the Library also recovered large portions of the Vilna YIVO’s prewar holdings along with thousands of rabbinic works from Vilna’s Strashun Library. Throughout its history, the YIVO Library has been a beehive of scholarship and bibliography, which has been fostered by such outstanding figures as Mendl Elkin and Dina Abramowicz.
In this presentation, Zachary M. Baker will offer some personal reflections on the legacy that the YIVO Library’s founders and builders have left behind.
View the bibliography for this talk: here
This lecture originally took place on February 19, 2025.
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