Yesterday's Lecture

Yesterday afternoon, we had the opportunity to hear Fira Bramson, the director emeritus of Judaica at the Lithuanian National Library, speak about the destruction and reconstruction of Jewish libraries in Vilnius. She spoke in Yiddish, and one of the professors from the program translated her words into English.
Before the war, Jews made up a third of Vilnius's population and Vilnius was a major center for publishing and printing books, including the religious books that were used throughout Eastern Europe. By the 1820's Rohm's publishing house was already publishing secular literature in the form of booklets of stories for women. Kletske press, one of the largest Jewish presses in Europe, published translations of world literature into Yiddish, children's literature, and textbooks, as well as classic Yiddish writers and new up-and-coming writers, including the group of writers known as Yung Vilna. The Tomer publishing house published scientific works. Later, Warsaw became the center of publishing but the printing itself continued to happen in Vilna. Fira mentioned that the Lithuanian National Library has selections from these scientific volumes, which were selected not by people but by the mere fact of their survival during the war, just like the people who remained after the war. There were four major Jewish libraries in Vilna before the war, the largest of which contained 15,000 volumes. The Yivo Institute for Jewish Studies was begun in Vilna, first out of the apartment of its founder, Max Weinreich and later in a new apartment, and finally, for 13 years, in its own building, which was built with funds raised from Jews around the world. In 1944 the building was destroyed by a bomb. Yivo was a major factor in the Jewish world, which connected itself to the people and collected important artifacts, some of which were saved and sent to Yivo when it relocated to New York.
When Jews were forced to enter the ghetto, many of them smuggled in their books, so that they managed to bring 1000 books into the ghetto and start a library there. The library was a cultural center for the ghetto. In 1941 the gestapo sent all of the books in Vilna to the Yivo building to be sorted - the most important were to be sent Frankfurt Germany's Nazi Institute for the Research into the Jewish Question. Seventy percent of the books were to be disposed of. The famous "paper brigade," a work group of twelve poets and writers, that was forced to sort through this literature, hid as much of it as they could, smuggling books into the ghetto, where they were stored in private homes, cellars, and the ghetto library.
After the war, the partisans who had left the ghetto through the sewage system came back to find the books and gather them into an exhibit on the cultural life and preservation of the human spirit in the ghetto. The Soviet government was not interested in displaying the exhibit and sent the materials from it to various institutes - it was never reassembled. During the Soviet years, Jewish life and expression was suppressed, and very little could be done with all of the Jewish books and materials that had been saved, They sat in a church, and in 1989, Fira and others were finally able to access the material and sort through it, finding papers from Yivo archives, newspapers, and kilos and kilos of books. Copies of some of this material was sent to Yivo in New York, but much of it can only be found in Vilnius. The catalogue for the library's holdings is undergoing digitization, so that the world will be able to see that in Vilnius they have 10,000 first editions, and copies of newspapers from the 1920's and 1930's that don't exist anywhere else.
Fira said that the fact that these materials were saved through all of the traumatic events of the 20th century, and the fact that when people could finally access them there were still people around who understood the significance of the materials and could read them is a miracle.
It was an honor to hear from a Jewish activist so dedicated to preserving the written material, the words and writings that bear witness to a Jewish world that was almost completely lost. In her retirement, Fira wrote a book of essays and thoughts about her work with the library, which was published in Lithuanian and Yiddish - I have a copy of it now and look forward to reading it!
This interesting newspaper article from 1996 discusses the precarious position of the materials from the library not so long ago.