Founded in 1925 in Vilna, Poland as the Yiddish Scientific Institute and headquartered in New York since 1940, YIVO is devoted to the history, society, and culture of Ashkenazic Jewry, and the influence of that culture as it has developed in the Americas. As the only pre-Holocaust scholarly institution to transfer its mission to the United States, YIVO is the preeminent center for the study of East European Jewry and Yiddish language, literature, and folklore.
The YIVO Archives holds collections of manuscripts (private papers), organizational files, photographs, films, videotapes, sound recordings, sheet music, posters, art works, and other artifacts pertaining to Ashkenazic Jewry. The major languages of the records in the YIVO Archives are Yiddish, English, Hebrew, Russian, Polish, French, and German. You may search or browse descriptions of over 1,800 collections through the Online Guide to the YIVO Archives at http://yivoarchives.org/. Printed finding aids, which contain detailed inventories of the contents of individual collections, may be obtained in the Reading Room. Many of these are currently available only in Yiddish. Some of the English-language finding aids are also available online at http://yivoarchives.org/.
The record types indicated by the tabs on the left is not comprehensive, but is an overview of the types of records held by the YIVO Archives that can be relevant to family history researchers. Note: The YIVO Archives does not have ship passenger lists or US census records, and has relatively few birth, marriage, and death records from a limited number of European towns.
YIVO Archives
15 West 16th Street
New York, NY 10011
(212) 246-6080
archives@yivo.cjh.org