How It Began

The student, Aaron Lansky, saw immediately that the world’s Yiddish books were endangered, tossed into dumpsters or consigned to damp basements and dusty attics by a new generation of Jews who could not read the language of their parents and grandparents. With the help of a network of dedicated zamlers (volunteer collectors), Lansky began working full-time to rescue precious Yiddish books.

No one really knew how many books could be recovered, though scholars estimated the world’s total at no more than 70,000. The fledgling Center collected that number in six months; two decades later, the National Yiddish Book Center safeguards more than 1.5 million volumes – and is still going strong. The books are a bridge between the old world and the new, a living record of Jews’ confrontation with the modern world in all its tumult and promise.

From the first, Aaron Lansky’s vision and chutzpah proved contagious. With books came people. In 1980, the brand-new organization boasted a grand total of 30 members. Today, membership is more than a thousand times that number. Early on, in response to the interests of its dedicated and growing constituency, the Center created programs designed to open up the contents of Yiddish and other modern Jewish books: popular conferences, lively workshops, internships for college students, performances, lectures, Yiddish language courses, an acclaimed national radio series, and Pakn Treger, the Center’s award-winning English-language magazine.

As Yiddish books filled shelf after shelf – first in Lansky’s home, then in a warehouse, then an abandoned silk factory, a former schoolhouse and a nineteenth-century mansion on the grounds of Mount Holyoke College – another imperative arose: to give Yiddish a permanent adres. In 1997, through the support of thousands of members, friends, and major foundations, a distinctive building, instantly dubbed “a post-modern shtetl” by the media, rose on a beautiful ten-acre plot surrounded by orchards and fields in the college town of Amherst, Massachusetts. “At last,” said writer and board member Kenneth Turan, “Yiddish has a home.”

The Center had hardly moved into its new building when concern arose for the books themselves. The most popular titles were in short supply, their crumbling pages yellow and brittle with age. In 1998, with the help of Steven Spielberg’s Righteous Persons Foundation, the Center began a four-year program to digitize every Yiddish title in its collection, preserving these texts forever and making brand-new reprints available to new generations of scholars and readers. In May 2002, the fully cataloged Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library went online at www.yiddishbooks.org. As The New York Times put it, “Yiddish, once on the verge of oblivion, has suddenly become the most in-print literature on the planet.”

And now, the Center is carrying digitization even further: using the latest technology to place the full content of more than 13,000 out-of-print Yiddish books at the fingertips of computer users everywhere.

In short, as it celebrates its 25th Anniversary in 2005, the National Yiddish Book Center continues to do what it does best: look ahead. The Center’s core mission serves as a springboard for new programs like translation, publishing, education, and more. We ask that you look ahead with us as we build for the future.