Thursday, April 04, 2024
Race to save historic record of Jewish life threatened by Ukraine-Russia war
Urgent efforts are under way to ensure that a unique record of early-20th-century Jewish life, which was collected by one of the leading Yiddish writers, survives the Russia-Ukraine war.
S. Ansky's The Dybbuk is probably the most famous work of Yiddish literature, along with Sholem Aleichem's stories of Tevye the Milkman, although Ansky never lived to see it performed.
From 1912 to 1914 the author — whose real name was Shloyme Zanvl Rappoport — headed an ethnographic expedition to document the legacy of Ashkenazi Jewry across the Pale of Settlement, gathering manuscripts, objects, amulets and all kinds of Judaica.
"He was aware that revolution was coming, that modernity was taking over. He wanted a record of what that life was," explained Jonathan Brent, executive director of the Yivo Institute of Jewish Research, which was set up in Vilna, Lithuania a century ago and is now based in New York.
Ansky's mission was interrupted by the First World War and the Russian revolution and he died in 1920. His collection was split into three parts: one is housed in Yivo, another in the Jewish Institute in St Petersburg, and the third in the Judaica department of the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine in Kyiv.
"To this day, 110 years after the end of the Ansky expedition, there has never been a complete presentation of the materials he found," Brent said. "His dream of making the material known to the wider Jewish world never materialised. That is what we hope to do digitally."
The idea of reuniting the collection came to him during a trip in 2013 on his first visit to Kyiv. "I saw materials collected by Ansky that I didn't know existed. The archivist showed me the notes Ansky made at the Beilis trial in 1913: he was a witness to the last blood libel trial in Europe. They have never been published. A lot has never seen the light of day."
But now the historic collection is in danger following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the bombardment of Kyiv and other cities.
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