Inside an Archival Box

For the YIVO Learning and Media Center's (YLMC) first pilot visit in May of 2023, we created a classroom set of archival boxes for teaching a lesson dedicated to the YIVO Youth Autobiography Contests of the 1930s. These boxes—full of high-quality reproductions of archival materials—have since been used dozens of times to teach visiting high school, college, and adult groups about the lives of Jewish youths in interwar Poland.

In response to feedback we received through surveys and discussions with educators, we decided that our next series of Archival Box Lessons would center on the story of the Paper Brigade and cultural resistance within the Vilna Ghetto. For this lesson, we created four boxes, each dedicated to a different Paper Brigade member—Zelig Kalmanovitch, Rachela Pupko-Krinsky, Herman Kruk, and Avrom Sutzkever. Each box features reproductions of materials from RG 223, the Sutzkever-Kaczerginski Collection, and is accompanied by an excerpt of a memoir or diary in translation which sheds light on the Paper Brigade’s work and life in the Vilna Ghetto. The featured materials touch on the ghetto school system, theater, and library and include reproductions of historical documents that the Paper Brigade saved from destruction, including manuscripts of Y. L. Peretz and Sh. An-ski, a diary from a young Theodor Herzl, and an autobiography of a Jewish youth submitted to one of the YIVO autobiography contests.

We debuted our new lesson with a group of students from The Dalton School in October of 2024 and look forward to sharing this lesson with many more visiting groups soon. Here are a few documents featured in these new boxes:

Construction Has Begun on YIVO’s Learning and Media Center!

 

Since May 2023, YIVO has been hosting pilot lessons with visiting groups of students from a variety of high schools and universities, including The Frisch School, Stuyvesant High School, Riverdale Country School, The Dalton School, Columbia University, and Sarah Lawrence College, among others. YIVO has used these pilot lessons to inform the design of its Learning and Media Center—a new publicly accessible exhibition and classroom area slated to open during YIVO’s centennial celebration in mid-2025.

 

The Learning and Media Center will include a classroom to host visiting groups for lessons which draw on our archival materials, cases that will display artifacts from YIVO’s Archives and Library, year-round exhibitions, an intimate open stacks library of Yiddish and English books, stations to listen to sound recordings and watch videos from YIVO’s collections, and more.