In 2025, the YIVO Institute, one of the most distinguished Jewish scholarly institutions in Eastern Europe, marked its centenary. One of the few Jewish organisations from the region to survive the Holocaust and continue its work to this day, YIVO is now based in New York. To mark the occasion, the Judaica Research Centre of the Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania has created a walking trail through Vilnius tracing the institute's origins and legacy.
Vilnius was no accident as the home of YIVO, founded in 1925. The city's Jewish intellectual life and its network of educational organisations made it a natural centre.
Between the wars, YIVO gained recognition across the entire Yiddish-speaking Jewish world – not only in Europe but in Argentina, Australia and the United States. Its honorary members and active supporters included some of the most eminent Jewish scholars of the age, among them Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud.
The institute's name – YIVO, from the Yiddish ייווא – stands for Jewish (or Yididsh) Scientific Institute (יידישער וויסנשאפטלעכער אינסטיטוט – Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut). Its particular focus was the Yiddish language and the history of Eastern European Jewry, alongside modern disciplines including economics and psychology. Four sections reflected these fields: philology, based in Vilnius; history, based in Berlin (later Paris after 1933); economics and statistics, also in Berlin (later Warsaw after 1933); and psychology and pedagogy, in New York.
The institute also maintained commissions for bibliography, ethnography, terminology and orthography attached to the philology section, and a Polish history commission in Warsaw attached to the history section. It had its own library and archive, separate museums of theatre, art and pedagogy, and ran a youth research project.
1. Basanavičiaus g. 16 (formerly Wielka Pohulanka 14)
This building housed the flat of Max Weinreich – linguist, one of YIVO's founders and its leading figure – from 1924. It was here, on March 24, 1925, that one of the founding acts of YIVO took place: a meeting of representatives of Jewish educational bodies approved a proposal by Nochum Shtif for the establishment of the institute, and a commission was set up to formalise the decision.
That commission produced the document known as the Vilna Theses on a Yiddish Scientific Institute. From autumn 1925 to autumn 1927, one room of Weinreich's flat served as YIVO's first central headquarters.
2. Basanavičiaus g. 15 (formerly Wielka Pohulanka 9)
Directly across the street from Weinreich's flat, this address was home between 1919 and 1931 to Tsemakh Shabad – Weinreich's father-in-law, having married his daughter Regina – and for a period to Weinreich himself. Shabad was chairman of the Vilnius Jewish community council, a member of Vilnius city council and one of YIVO's founding figures.
YIVO's graduate programme for young researchers was named in his honour. Established in 1934, it offered seven disciplines: language, literature, folklore, history, economics, sociology-psychology and pedagogy. By 1940, 68 students had taken part in the programme.
3. Basanavičiaus g. 17 (formerly Wielka Pohulanka 11, after 1931 – Wielka Pohulanka 17)
The home of Zalmen Reyzin, linguist, YIVO board member and one of the institute's founders. In Vilnius between 1926 and 1929, Reyzin published his Lexicon of Yiddish Literature, Press and Philology, and served as editor of YIVO Bleter, the institute's principal periodical.
4. Basanavičiaus g. 20 (formerly Wielka Pohulanka 18)
From autumn 1927, YIVO's central headquarters moved here into premises belonging to the Central Education Committee. From autumn 1928 the institute occupied a full twelve-room flat in the building. The address also housed several other Jewish institutions, including the Central Education Committee, the Vilnius Education Society, the ORT technical school, the Jewish Journalists' Syndicate and the Vilnius Union of Jewish Artists.
5. Vivulskio g. 18
YIVO's home from early 1933. The plot was acquired in autumn 1928, and a foundation stone was laid in October 1929 during the first general YIVO conference. The global financial crisis intervened, however, and the institute adapted an existing building set back from the street.
Vilnius remained YIVO's centre until the end of 1939, when the Soviet occupation of the city and its transfer to Lithuania prompted Max Weinreich to move the headquarters to New York. The Vilnius branch continued, however, until Lithuania's Soviet occupation in June 1940, when it was absorbed into the Lithuanian Institute as the JIVO Institute, its staff reduced from 50 to 9.
After Nazi Germany occupied Lithuania in 1941, the institute's director Noach Prilutski was arrested. From 1942, on the orders of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, books were sorted for removal to Germany. The task was assigned to twenty ghetto prisoners with knowledge of the relevant languages. This group – which included YIVO leader Zelig Kalmanovitch, librarian Herman Kruk, poets Abraham Sutzkever and Shmerke Kaczerginski, and artist Uma Olkenitska – became known as the Paper Brigade.
The building itself did not survive the war; a bomb destroyed it during the Soviet recapture of Vilnius. A nine-storey residential block stands on the site today. A commemorative plaque marking the YIVO institute was unveiled there in 2019.
An account left by Lucy Dawidowicz, an American YIVO graduate student, describes the building in vivid detail.
It was a dark grey wooden structure with white pilasters and white window frames. The entrance hall had two square columns, polished parquet floors and display cases showing YIVO publications. Beyond the columns, a double staircase led upward, and on its first landing hung a large coloured world map marking YIVO's affiliated branches.
The building contained 24 rooms, a basement archive, a library, a reading room, an exhibition hall and a bibliography centre with shelves reaching the ceiling holding 220,000 indexed articles. The library held 40,000 books; the press archive contained 10,000 bundles of Jewish newspapers from around the world in multiple languages.
Other rooms housed manuscript and autograph collections, pamphlets, Yiddish folklore materials, youth autobiographies and historical documents of the Vilnius Jewish community. A Theatre Museum occupied part of the ground floor; the upper floor held the institute's administration, a large conference hall, a further exhibition space and graduate students' offices.
6. Universiteto g. 3 – Vilnius University
Many YIVO graduate students studied at Vilnius University, known between the world wars as Stefan Batory University. In 1940, a Department of Yiddish Language and Literature was opened within the university's Faculty of Humanities, led by Noach Prilutski, a former YIVO collaborator in Warsaw who had come to Vilnius as a war refugee.
The opening ceremony took place on November 12, 1940 in the Sniadeckis (now Theatre) Hall. The department operated until the Nazi occupation in June 1941, when Jewish scholars were expelled from the university.
During the Nazi occupation from 1941 to 1944, Ona Šimaitė was the university's librarian, later recognised as the first Lithuanian to receive the title of Righteous Among the Nations, for her role in saving not only Jewish lives but cultural treasures. A memorial plaque in her honour was unveiled in the university's Simonas Daukantas courtyard in 2004.
7. Didžioji g. 33 / Arklių g. 1 – Palace Theatre
This was the venue for the opening ceremony and plenary sessions of the first general YIVO conference in 1929, attended by nearly 100 delegates from cities across Poland and from YIVO support groups in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Germany and Romania.
8. Liejyklos g. 4b (formerly ul. Ludwisarska 4) – Vilnius Jewish Theatre
Known in Yiddish as the Vilner Yidisher Teater (before 1932, the Folksteater), this was the venue for the opening of the second general YIVO conference in 1935, held to mark the institute's tenth anniversary.
Nearly 140 delegates attended from Poland and from Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, the United States, France, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Romania, Argentina and Palestine. A commemorative plaque on the building marks the Jewish People's Theatre and its founders.
9. Rūdninkų g. 18 – Great Gates of the Vilnius Ghetto
It was through this entrance that members of the Paper Brigade smuggled precious books and documents into the ghetto for safekeeping during the Nazi occupation.
10. Žemaitijos g. 4 (formerly ul. Straszuna 6) – Jewish Museum
The Jewish Museum operated here from 1944 to 1949, and it was here that YIVO documents hidden in ghetto bunkers and other locations across Vilnius were brought after the war.
Before the war, the building had housed the library of the Vilnius Jewish Society Mefitse Haskala (Disseminators of Enlightenment). During the war it served as the ghetto prison, and was among the least damaged of the ghetto buildings.
11. K. Sirvydo g. 4 – former Book Chamber (St George's Church and Old Rule Carmelite Monastery)
Established in 1945 to collect and preserve all publications issued in Lithuania, the Book Chamber was directed for many years by Antanas Ulpis.
It was thanks to his efforts that in 1949, following the closure of the Jewish Museum, the surviving Vilnius Jewish documents, including fragments of the YIVO collection and books from various Jewish libraries, were transferred here for safekeeping.
In 1989 a Judaica sector was established within the Book Chamber, led by Estera Bramson-Alpernienė. In 1992 the institution was merged with the Martynas Mažvydas National Library. In 2017 its entire collection was moved to the library's main building, and the premises were returned to the Catholic Church.
12. Gedimino pr. 51 – Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania
The library is home to the Judaica Research Centre and its Judaica collection, which includes a dedicated YIVO document fund.
During renovation work in 2016, materials that Antanas Ulpis had transferred to the National Library from the Jewish Museum's collection in 1949 were rediscovered in the library's rare books and manuscripts holdings.
In 2017 the Judaica collection from the former Book Chamber was brought to the main building. That same year the Judaica Research Centre was established, led by Lara Lempertienė, with a remit to curate and study not only the library's own Judaica holdings but the entire collection inherited from the Book Chamber.
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