The history of the Jews – told through 100 objects

Every museum has a different approach to telling its story to the world. In London, for example, the V&A has just opened its East Storehouse in part of the 2012 Olympic Park, an open-access warehouse that gives the public the opportunity to go behind the scenes and find out how and why its 250,000 treasures were acquired.

You could say the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York has gone in the opposite direction. Instead of inviting the public to its premises, to mark its centenary, it has distilled its collection of 24 million artefacts into a coffee-table book that showcases 100 of them.

[Missing Credit]

The museum was founded in Vilnius, Lithuania by far-sighted Jewish scholars who wanted to preserve as many aspects of Yiddish life and culture as they could. And so they did, until the Second World War erupted, forcing them to hide much of the collection – and, in a move that might have spelled the end for many museums – relocate to New York, where it continues to flourish. In the 100 years since YIVO’s founding, the organisation has become the natural home for millions of items of Jewish interest, and the new book, in which each object has its own accompanying essay, reflects a very rich heritage.

The United States Constitution and Declaration of Independence in Yiddish, translated by the Lithuanian philosopher Getsl Zelikovitsh in 1892[Missing Credit]

While the collection is not all academic and high-flown, there is plenty of the latter, including a tractate of the Babylonian Talmud, hand-transcribed in Frankfurt in 1721 by the founder of the Rothschild dynasty when he was just 12.  Four generations of Rothschilds held this until it was eventually acquired by the Manischewitz Brothers (yes, the siblings of matzo fame) who acquired it and presented it to YIVO in 1946.

Theodore Herzl's diary when he was a student at Vienna University[Missing Credit]A plaster mask made to preserve the appearance of American Yiddish writer Yehoask, the pen name of Solomon Bloomgarden and The Rothschild Talmud hand copied by 12-year-old Amschel Moses Rothschild in 1721[Missing Credit]Toys made by Mayer Kirshenblatt[Missing Credit]

There is, remarkably, the diary of the young Theodor Herzl, written when he was a young student in Vienna and full of post-adolescent angst that he would never amount to anything. The diary was bought for YIVO in 1931 in London by the Yiddish linguist and historian Zalmen Reyzen from the estate of Herzl’s son, Hans Herzl. It was among the treasures buried in the Vilna Ghetto during the Second World War and then sent to New York for safekeeping.

The small glass bulbs called bankes that were used for the cupping process[Missing Credit]

Some of the more prosaic objects grip the imagination just as firmly. Some small glass bulbs dating from around 1900 being a case in point. Called bankes in Yiddish, they were used as an alternative therapy for treating arthritis and asthma, among other conditions. A heated bulb was placed on the patient’s skin to create a vacuum. Whatever the efficacy of the practice of cupping, as it was called, it was sufficiently widespread among eastern European Jews to warrant a set of bankes being donated to YIVO.

A 1904 cast-iron hand seal press from the Wolyner Young Men's Benevolent Society and Yiddish writer and poet Kadia Molodowsky's notebook[Missing Credit]

There is a lovely cast-iron hand seal press, ornately decorated in the shape of a lion, belonging to the Wolyner Young Men’s Benevolent Society.  Launched in 1904, it was one of the thousands of mutual aid organisations established by Jewish immigrants to America. The Wolyner Society closed its doors in 1996, but its legacy remains at YIVO.

And there is the offbeat: Mae Simon’s red shoes, a sparkly pair of glittering heels that may have inspired Dorothy’s ruby-red footwear in The Wizard of Oz.

Simon was a popular Yiddish actress, born in Grodno in Polish Lithuania in 1886, though we only know this from her gravestone, as throughout her career she shaved four years off her age. She came to America when she was ten years old and joined the amateur Yiddish theatre when she was 15, transferring to Yiddish vaudeville, after which she gradually appeared on stage with stars such as Paul Muni. Eventually she even had her own theatre company and appeared in the first Yiddish motion picture, Mayn Yiddish Mama. Her shoes were acquired by YIVO from an antique dealer named Leo Mavrovitis.

One of the most intriguing objects in the book is a set of rusting keys, with a label attached in Yiddish.  They were the keys for the New Yiddish Theatre in London’s East End, and, in 1947, were used to lock up the theatre for good by one very angry actor and theatre-manager, Abish Meisels.

He sent the keys to the YIVO director in New York, Max Weinrich. According to YIVO’s research, Meisels believed that the Jewish community of London was actively working to destroy Yiddish theatre. He told Weinreich the theatre had agreed to buy the building from the Grand Order of Israel, a Jewish self-help society founded in the UK, only to be massively outbid by the United Synagogue (US). In his letter to Weinreich, Meisels wrote: “Unfortunately I am sending you the keys to a closed and destroyed theatre – not by Hitler but by the beys din tsedek [righteous rabbinical court] of London.”

In a label tied to the keys he records, in Yiddish, that the US had paid a whopping £30,000 for the theatre, which had secured an agreement to pay a more modest £16,000 (Bank of England rates suggest that the US paid the present-day equivalent of over £1 million for the Adler Street building previously occupied by the theatre).

The tool kit of furrier Albert Synder[Missing Credit]

And, as you would expect in a museum documenting Jewish history, there is the monstrous. Auschwitz B ock Eight ledger is a record of arrivals and departures in Block Eight of the Auschwitz Stammlager (main camp) and contains the names, nationalities and date of arrival at the camp of around 5,400 people. It also records their next destination.

The Auschwitz Block Eight Ledger[Missing Credit]

Stefanie Halpern, director of the YIVO archives, was the person given the task of selecting 100 objects for the book. “The act of curating 100 objects from the 24 million in our collections may seem like an impossible task, but in many ways I’ve been thinking about this for the ten years I’ve been here.

“I had a list of objects I thought should be featured, and I invited my colleagues to add to it.

“We had several hundred on our initial list, so we arranged them according to ten broad topics that aligned closely with YIVO’s own collecting initiatives over the past 100 years, and then began whittling down from there.

“Because there were so many historically and culturally significant moments to cover within each topic, I wanted to make sure that no two objects told the same story.

“For each object that was chosen, dozens of others could have been selected in its place.”

Meanwhile, there are not dozens but thousands of posters waiting in the wings for the museum’s next project.

“We are planning a book featuring some of them”.

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100 Objects from the Collections of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research is published on June 22