The YIVO Institute for Jewish research has launched a campaign to raise $10, 000, 000 for the support and maintenance of the institution and to intensity research into all phases of Jewish life throughout the world. The money will be raised by the Institute’s Heritage Foundation which is headed by Bernard Walzer, a New York industrialist. Appeals for gifts were sent out today to the friends and supporters of YIVO.
The Heritage Foundation drive is designed to make possible the continuance of the Institute’s program which includes: the archives, containing over 2,000,000 documents of Jewish history and culture; the YIVO library of over 300, 000 volumes that depict in detail the religious, historical, sociological, economic and literary aspects of Jewish existence over the last 500 years; the Institute’s scientific and cultural publications and the many conferences, forums, lectures and exhibitions held each year by the Institute.
YIVO was founded in Vilna in 1925 and was moved to New York in 1940 to escape the Nazis. At present the Institute occupies a five-story building on upper Fifth Avenue. Among the many treasures housed there are books actually used by the famous Vilna Gaon, writings by Dr. Theodor Herzl, a tractate of the Rothschild Talmud written by Anshel Rothschild in 1822, and the original manuscripts of many celebrated Yiddish writers, poets and playwrights. The Institute’s main purpose, according to Julius Borenstein, chairman of the executive committee, is “to give Jews–and the world–a better understanding of Jewish life, history and culture.”
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