This event will take place at Ezra-Habonim, the Niles Township Jewish Congregation, 4500 Dempster, Skokie, IL.
Letters written by Sholem Aleichem. A postcard hand-written by Marc Chagall. Five notebooks of Yiddish poetry. Yiddish theater scripts including one of “Sherlock Holmes.” Fragments of an 1877 manuscript of the first Yiddish “best-seller.” These and many more treasures will be part of a lecture and presentation of significant artifacts rescued from the Nazis.
The program Rare Works and the Reclamation of the Cultural History of European Jews, will be presented by historian Jonathan Brent, Executive Director and CEO of YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.
The presentation is free and open to the public.
This important collection of papers, letters and manuscripts was found recently in the basement of a church in Vilnius, Lithuania, as part of the continuing work of The Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Collections Project, begun in 2014, is a seven-year, $5.6 million project to preserve and digitize approximately 1.1 million pages of materials and some 12,000 books that were rescued from the Holocaust. The recent discovery of more than 170,000 pages of documents in Vilnius is the newest and most exciting part of this Project.