YIVO Institute for Jewish Research

YIVO was initially proposed by Yiddish linguist and writer Nochum Shtif. He characterized his advocacy of Yiddish as "realistic" Zionism, contrasted to both the "visionary" Hebraists and the "self-hating" assimilationists who adopted Russian or Polish. Other key founders included philologist Max Weinreich and historian Elias Tcherikower.

YIVO was founded at a Berlin conference in 1925, but headquartered in Vilnius, a city with a large Jewish population in the Second Polish Republic. The early YIVO also had branches in Berlin, Warsaw and New York City. Over the next decade, smaller groups arose in many of the other countries with Ashkenazi populations.

In YIVO's first decades, Tcherikover headed the historical research section, which also included Simon Dubnow, Saul M. Ginsburg, Abraham Menes, and Jacob Shatzky. Leibush Lehrer headed a section including psychologists and educators Abraham Golomb, H. S. Kasdan, and Abraham Aaron Roback. Jacob Lestschinsky headed a section of economists and demographers Ben-Adir, Liebmann Hersch, and Moshe Shalit. Weinreich's language and literature section included Judah Leib Cahan, Alexander Harkavy, Judah A. Joffe, Zelig Kalmanovich, Shmuel Niger, Noach Pryłucki, and Zalman Reisen. YIVO also collected and preserved ethnographic materials under the direction of its Ethnographic Committee., YIVO's honorary board of trustees (Curatorium) in 1925 consisted of Simon Dubnow, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Moses Gaster, Edward Sapir and Chaim Zhitlowsky.

YIVO operated a graduate training program from 1934 to 1940, known as the Aspirantur. Named after Zemach Shabad, YIVO's chairman, the program held classes and guided students in conducting original research in the field of Jewish studies. Many of the students' projects were sociological in nature (reflecting the involvement of Max Weinreich) and gathered information on contemporary Jewish life in the Vilna region.

The Nazi advance into Eastern Europe caused YIVO to move its operations to New York City. A second important center, known as the Fundacion IWO, was established in Buenos Aires, Argentina. All four directors of YIVO's research sections were already in the Americas when the war broke out or were able to make their way there. The organization's new headquarters were established in New York City in 1940. A portion of the Vilna archives was ransacked by the Nazis and sent to Frankfurt to become the basis of an antisemitic department of the Nazis' planned university. The U.S. Army recovered these documents in 1946 and sent them to YIVO in New York.

The YIVO Library was looted by the Germans and the ERR, but an organization called the "Paper Brigade" were able to smuggle out many books, and preserve them from destruction. The materials were then saved from the Soviets by a Lithuanian librarian, Antanas Ulpis, and are now held in the Lithuanian Central State Archives and Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania.

YIVO director Jonathan Brent established the Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Online Collections project in 2014. With the help of the Lithuanian government, the project aimed to preserve and digitize over 1.5 million documents and approximately 12,200 books, representing 500 years of Jewish history in Eastern Europe and Russia.

In addition to New York City and Buenos Aires, the Chicago YIVO Society is a third center active today.