Mark Oppenheimer: Hi friends. I’m Mark Oppenheimer, and this is Arc: The Podcast. A few months back, I was talking to Jonathan Brent, who is the director of YIVO, which is the world’s preeminent institution for research into Yiddish language and culture. Jonathan was telling me how this is YIVO’s hundredth anniversary and I was saying that we should really do something together to celebrate that milestone.  So we started talking and Jonathan was discussing some of the amazing work YIVO has done in the past and is still doing today, which includes teaching Lithuanians about how to teach their own Yiddish past. It’s a remarkable thing given that Lithuania, which used to be the world center of Yiddish culture, lost almost all of its Jews in the Holocaust. And now, as Jonathan was telling me, YIVO was helping to bring Yiddish learning back to a country that is almost entirely Christian today.

This sounded like a remarkable story. And so I decided to send my deputy editor at Arc, David Sugarman, to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, to learn more. David went and the story he came back with will blow your mind. It is a tale of language, love and loss, of cunning and espionage, of death and rebirth.

So, with this timeless tale of Yiddish survival, from the Baltic lands of Eastern Europe, all the way to New York and back again, here’s my friend and colleague, David Sugarman.

David Sugarman: In the early 1990s, a young man was walking around the old quarter of Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania.

The city had just survived 45 years of Soviet occupation, proceeded by several brutal years of Nazi occupation. This young man, his parents, his grandparents had lived through a half century of violence and suppression. Fifty years that had killed most of Lithuania’s large Jewish population, erased that community’s history, and warped the public and private lives of every Lithuanian citizen.

This young man was wandering the old city in a country that had just recovered its independence when he saw something: high up on a wall, an alphabet he couldn’t read. It wasn’t Lithuanian, and it wasn’t Russian, and he began to notice it all across the city.

MV: The alphabet was totally unknown to me. And I was wondering what these letters are. And I felt they are very beautiful. And I thought I would like to read them some time.

DS: Those letters turned out to be Hebrew and the language, Yiddish.

MV: But I was still a teenager. I knew almost nothing about Jewish history, Jewish culture, or Yiddish language. During the late Soviet period, these topics were nonexistent. Then I started looking for some information about the Jews, about the Jewish life in Vilnius.

DS: This young man’s name was Mindaugas Kvietkauskas. He would go on to learn Yiddish, gaining access to a lost world of Lithuanian Jewry. Along with other scholars of his generation, he would dig into his country’s past and start recovering its history, fragment by fragment, book by book, archive by archive.

Mindaugas would pick up a conversation, a Yiddish conversation, that the Nazis, the Soviets had nearly silenced. It was a Yiddish conversation that people had worked tirelessly to save, that people had died to save. Evidence of Yiddish culture, of Lithuanian Jewish life had to be hidden from the SS and from the Red Army in walls and floorboards and church closets all across of Vilnius.

Many of the people who did this work did it for one organization: YIVO. The Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut.

Rooted in pre-war Vilnius and today located in New York City, YIVO is one of the world’s preeminent institutions for preserving and promoting Yiddish culture and language.

I grew up hearing plenty about the Holocaust and plenty of Yiddish. My maternal grandparents were survivors and spoke Yiddish at home, but I didn’t know much about YIVO.

The institution was founded in the early twentieth century in Vilnius, or Vilnia in Yiddish, when that city was arguably the global center of the language. At YIVO’s founding, more than ten million people spoke Yiddish. Today, as YIVO marks its hundredth year, Yiddish is likely spoken by fewer than a million. Almost no one speaks Yiddish in Vilnius now, in this country where nearly all of the Jews were murdered, so I was surprised to learn YIVO is still active there, helping Lithuanians rescue their Jewish history.

I went to Vilnius to learn more. What I found there was an extraordinary story of a secret cache of Jewish artifacts stolen from the Nazis and secreted away from the Soviets. A story about a group of writers and academics risking their lives to preserve history, a salvaged history that today is changing Lithuanian culture. I want to tell you that story.

I am in Ponari, a beautiful forest just outside of the city, full of wildflowers and bright birds, which I see darting through the trees as I walk the wooded paths.

Flowers everywhere, all of these birds.

This the a place where, from 1941 to 1944, as many as seventy thousand Jews were murdered by the Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators. For centuries before the Holocaust, Lithuanian Jewry had flourished.

KW: Vilna is unique as a city of both tradition and modernity.

DS: Kalman Weiser teaches Jewish studies at York University in Canada.

KW: Vilna is both old and new at the same time. Vilna is the Vilna Gaon. Goan of Vilna, it’s a place where Haskala took off in the nineteenth century Jewish enlightenment. It’s also a place of the birth of the Bund in 1897, where Zionism was popular very early in Eastern Europe.

DS: In short, Vilna was the center of all of these strands of Jewish modernity. It was a vibrant hub of Jewish learning, literature, and culture, the home of yeshivas and artists and intellectuals.

KW: This is the place to be to create the modern Jewish secular nation. It’s the Jerusalem of Lithuania.

DS: Before World War II, when Vilna had about one hundred and fifty thousand people, roughly forty percent of its population was Jewish and the language of life in Vilna was Yiddish, a language intimately tied not only to everyday Jewish life in Europe but also to arguments about the Jewish future. In the early 1920s, a group of European Jewish scholars decided that Yiddish needed its own research center, and that such a center should be in Vilna. That center was YIVO.

JB: It was founded as an institute serving multiple purposes.

DS: This is Jonathan Brent, YIVO’s current director.

JB: To preserve records of the past at a time when it was obvious to the leaders of the YIVO Institute that Jewish life was radically changing. 

DS: At the time, large numbers of Jews were leaving Eastern Europe, often for the United States. Many who left intermarried or assimilated into broader Western culture. Fewer and fewer children learned Yiddish or grew up in the same village as their grandparents.

JB: And it was felt that the past of perhaps thousand years, if not more, of Jewish life would be lost and would not be transmitted to future generations. And so the YIVO Institute was born partly out of that desire. Another desire was to create a place where the Yiddish language was honored, where the Jewish people were understood to have the right to its own sovereign identity. It also meant studying for the first time the history of day-to-day life that represented for these scholars the true account of how the Jewish people came to be what they are.

DS: But European Jewry was on the cusp of calamity. First, the Soviets occupied Vilna in 1940 and then the Nazis conquered Lithuania from the Soviets in 1941. Part of the Nazis genocidal project was the creation of the Frankfurt Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question. Founded in 1939, the Frankfurt Institute aimed to legitimize the Nazis murderous program through pseudoscientific studies and racist rhetoric. The Institute produced pamphlets, organized conferences, and churned out deeply anti-Semitic materials that sought to frame the Jews as an existential threat to German society. In many ways, it was the antithesis to YIVO, producing research about the Jews, but in the case all anti-Semitic lies. 

YIVO and the Frankfurt Institute had one thing in common though: an interest in Jewish artifacts. The Nazis wanted artifacts for a museum on the degeneracy of the Jew, a museum that could justify their genocide. To do so, they forced into labor the Jews themselves, in fact the very Jews who had been collecting Jewish artifacts for YIVO. They were now forced to loot their own collections for the Nazis.

JB: To find the very best materials and ship them back to Frankfurt. The task was for Kalmanovich and Krazinsky and others to select these materials because it required scholarship to know what was going on in these documents and everything.