Ulpis, who helped save the documents later found in the church basement, died in 1981.Adblock Adblock Plus Adblocker Ultimate Ghostery uBlock Origin Others
Sutzkever had an illustrious career as a poet in Israel and died at age 96 in 2010. Kaczerginski was killed in 1954 in a plane crash in the Andes. Fishman, some in death camps like Treblinka or in labor camps or in more random fashion. Some 34 of the 40 people viewed by experts as having been members of the “paper brigade” died, according to Mr. The crew that rescued these records largely did not survive the war. The ragtag Jewish water carriers formed a guild, which promised to donate a Torah scroll and a set of Talmuds to the yeshiva if members were given a room of their own, rent-free, for worship. In Vilna at that time, water carriers were needed to deliver buckets of water to homes from available wells. What is a water carrier, a Talmud student might ask? Fishman, who this month published “The Book Smugglers: Partisans, Poets and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures From the Nazis.”Īmong the more mundane curiosities that were salvaged is a weathered agreement from 1857 between a yeshiva in Vilna and a union of water carriers. “It’s going to take decades for scholars to analyze all of this,” said Mr.
But it has allowed YIVO to digitize them for the use of the general public - and to have select items to display in Manhattan later this month. Lithuania has chosen to hold onto all the Jewish documents in the library’s Judaica center as part of its national heritage. They had been stored in a separate church basement room and had never been evaluated because none of the assigned archivists could read Yiddish or Hebrew. Brent, of the new trove of 170,000 documents. Last year, the entire basement collection was transferred to the Martynas Mazvydas National Library of Lithuania, which had reopened in a grand colonnaded building, and in May officials there informed Mr. He is, as a result, regarded by YIVO as a kind of Oskar Schindler of document rescue. George’s, stashed stacks of Jewish materials in basement rooms to hide them from Stalin’s enforcers. (The Soviets frowned on anything evocative of ethnic or religious loyalties.) Meanwhile, a gentile librarian, Antanas Ulpis, who was assembling the remnants of the national library in a former church, St. When the Germans were pushed out of Lithuania by the Soviets, survivors like Sutzkever spirited some hidden treasures to New York. Risking death by a firing squad, this “paper brigade” rescued thousands of books and documents. They needed Yiddish speakers to analyze and select the materials, and deployed 40 ghetto residents like Sutzkever and another raffish poet, Shmerke Kaczerginski, as slave laborers. (In Lithuania alone, 90 percent of the prewar Jewish population of 160,000 was murdered.) With characteristic incongruity, though, they decided to save a third of the YIVO collection for a research center near Frankfurt that would study “the Jewish question” even if they planned to make sure the Jews would be extinct. When the Nazis occupied Lithuania from 1941 to 1944, they were determined to incinerate or grind up the country’s Jewish collections, particularly those at YIVO, which from 1925 to 1940 in Vilna was the world’s foremost library of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. When “I would open my mouth,” she wrote, “they would pour in food.”Īlmost as intriguing as the cache is the serpentine story of the documents’ rescue and rediscovery, much of which had been known before but which has been updated with the new find. A 1933 “autobiography” by a malnourished fifth grader, Bebe Epshtein, describes how her parents forced her to eat by telling her beguiling stories. Brent and his staff said they were just as excited by more quotidian items like scripts of “Sherlock Holmes” and other popular entertainments that delighted prewar Jews and an astronomical guide with a set of dials to calculate when religious holidays should fall, given variations in the lengths of Jewish lunar months. In one poem, Sutzkever expresses his fear that “Death is rushing, riding on a bullet-head/To tear apart in me my brightest dream.” Fishman and Jonathan Brent, YIVO’s executive director, discussed other findings, including, an early poem by Abraham Goldfaden, the father of the flourishing Yiddish theater in Europe and on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and 10 poems handwritten in the Vilna ghetto by Abraham Sutzkever, among the greatest Yiddish poets. 24 at YIVO headquarters on West 16th Street. A selection of 10 items from the newly found literary manuscripts, letters, diaries, synagogue record books, theater posters and ephemera will go on display on Oct.
0 kommentar(er)
