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Treasure Trove of Documents on Pre-war Jewish Life Goes Online
(Ha'aretz) Judy Maltz - The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research completed on Monday the digitization of its entire prewar library and archival collection. The 7-year, $7 million project will provide the public with free access to 4.1 million pages of original books, artifacts, records, manuscripts - including many believed to have been destroyed and lost during the Nazi and Soviet eras. The materials were once part of the main YIVO collection in Vilnius, Lithuania, established in 1925. In 1941, the Nazis ransacked the YIVO library and sent materials to the Nazi Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question in Frankfurt to "produce scholarship that would demonstrate why it was necessary to annihilate Jewish civilization and culture," said YIVO CEO Jonathan Brent. In 1946, the U.S. Army recovered 1 million documents and 9,000 books in a warehouse outside Frankfurt and sent them to YIVO in New York.