Shortly after news reached London that the Nazis had finally ended the heroic resistance of the Warsaw Ghetto, Szmul Zygielbojm took his life. For a year since his arrival as a refugee in Britain, the Jewish socialist had tried to alert the world to what was being done to his people.
But in a final act of protest against the failure of the Allies to come to their aid, he martyred himself on May 11, 1943. “I cannot continue to live and to be silent while the remnants of Polish Jewry, whose representative I am, are being murdered,” he wrote.
His suicide letter survived and is now preserved for posterity in the world’s premier archive on pre-War East European Jews, the Yivo Institute in New York.
His must be one of the most moving testimonies linked to British Jewry. But it is not the only item associated with our community held by Yivo. “We have over 40 linear feet of material on English Jewry that we accumulated in the 1920s and 30s,” said Yivo’s chief executive Jonathan Brent. “It’s a lot — photographs, documents, posters, all kinds of things.
“We have one of the truly great and important archives — the archives of Lucien Wolf, the journalist and politician.” Mr Wolf, who died in 1930, was an early opponent of political Zionism who feared it might endanger the hard-won rights of Jews in England.
“His archive was sent first from London to Yivo in Vilnius. In 1941 it was seized by the Nazis, boxed up and sent to Frankfurt. After the war, the US found it and sent it to New York.” And now after a gap of many years, Yivo has re-established an office in London, both to spread the word about its unique resources and encourage British Jews to learn about the historic communities from which many of us come.
The Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut, as it was originally named in Yiddish, was founded in Vilnius in 1925 to document Jewish society and culture. “Yivo was collecting stuff all the time. It was pretty much a mass movement among East European Jews,” Mr Brent explained.
“And wherever they went, there were these zamlers — collectors. There was a New York office, a Buenos Aires office. There were offices in Paris and London. From its beginning, it was a global institution that reached out to the Jewish world.”
But little could its founders have realised how valuable their initiative would become, collecting records of communities that would be destroyed within 20 years.
Even now documents are turning up: 170,000 pages of material relating to pre-war Lithuanian Jewry were discovered only last year, including a postcard from Marc Chagall, a letter from Sholom Aleichem and an astronomical treatise dating back to the 18th century. “We recently acquired over 100,000 items about Chinese Jews going back to the 16th century.”
Not so long ago, a group of Russians visited the institute in New York. “They were intrigued and they asked me, ‘What is all this paper, all these books, for?’
“My answer was: the Jewish people worldwide after the Holocaust was cut off from its roots, from its traditions — except when they were remembered over dinner tables and through a couple of institutions. It was cut off, more importantly, from living historic memory.
“And consequently, it developed all kinds of stereotypes about what that history was. It was either sentimentalised or full of bitterness and resentment.
“When you start going into this history and finding out how people actually lived, you see a much different story. And so we can help people understand that much deeper story.
“It is our conviction that in order for the Jewish people to have a real future, it has to know its past. Kids have got to know what grandma and grandpa did in that little town.
It is more than just a curiosity of family history, it helps you understand who you are, why you are and essentially it is important for building Jewish understanding and pride.”
The Jewish past in East Europe and Russia, he said, “was not simply a past of humiliation and degradation and oppression. It was a past of incredible strength and civilization-building, inventiveness and creativity.”
Indeed, one of Yivo’s aims is to try “to unlock the mystery of Jewish creativity and the Jewish contribution to world culture. Only if we understand the dynamics of Jewish life in late 19th century can we understand the explosion of Jewish creativity around the world by the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th.
“Only in this way can we begin to understand Dada, Russian futurism, Chagall, even Sigmund Freud. How is that the greatest critic and scholar of Russian classical ballet was a Jewish guy who came from a stetl in Poland, Akim Volynsky?”
The new London branch owes its existence to the enthusiasm of the Anglo-Jewish philanthropist Alan Howard, after he visited the institute in New York. Back in London, he brought over Yivo representatives to a dinner three years ago that was attended by 100 people and addressed by the historian Sir Simon Schama.
“He wanted to introduce Yivo to the English community because he thought not enough people knew of the immense treasures we have in our archive,” he said.
For its local board members, Yivo has recruited the writer Eva Hoffman and David Saul, who runs a business providing office space. Its director of operations, William Pimlott, is studying for a doctorate in Yiddish at UCL.
“We have to have exhibitions, we want to have programmes here,” Mr Brent said. “We want to partner with organisations like JW3 or the Pears Institute (at Birkbeck College) or the Wiener Library.”
Through digitisation, Yivo’s resources are already becoming increasingly accessible beyond the USA. More than 50 British Jews have taken online courses on Ashkenazi history, folklore and the Yiddish theatre.
There is a British link, too, to one of the more unexpected items in Yivo’s storehouse — the Vilna Vegetarian cookbook. It was published in Lithuania in 1938 in Yiddish but most copies disappeared in the Holocaust.
Nearly 60 years later, a couple of American tourists to the UK had popped into a shop in the Cotswolds.
“He was a stamp collector and he wandered into a bookstore that sold stamps. In the corner there was a barrel with some books.
“While he was looking at stamps, his wife goes over to the corner and starts browsing through the books and then pulls out something strange.
“‘I’ve never seen anything like this before,’ she said. It was the cookbook. She was fluent in Yiddish. They bought it and sent it to us. There are maybe only two other copies — one in Oxford, one in Harvard.”
But now many people are again cooking the dishes of vegetarian Lithuania. The book was translated into English and republished two years ago.
