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The first headquarters of the Institute for Jewish Research (YIVO)

J. Basanavičius St. 16, 03224 Vilnius, Lithuania

YIVO is an organization that preserves, studies, and teaches the cultural history of Jewish life throughout Eastern Europe, Germany, and Russia, as well as orthography, lexicography, and other research related to Yiddish.
Lithuania: Vilnius: Ruins of the Lithuanian Jerusalem
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Jermaine

In 1925, Max Weinreich founded the headquarters of YIVO (the Institute for Jewish Research) in one of the rooms of this building. This organization preserves, studies, and teaches the cultural history of Jewish life throughout Eastern Europe, Germany, and Russia, as well as orthography, lexicography, and other research related to Yiddish. It was founded in 1925 in Vilna in the Second Polish Republic (now Vilnius, Lithuania) as the Yiddish Scientific Institute (Yiddish: ייִדישער וויסנשאַפֿטלעכער אינסטיטוט, Latinized: Idisher Visn), where the word "Idisher" means both "Yiddish" and "Jewish".

Soon, YIVO became the largest Jewish scholarly institution in the world. Members of the institute’s honorary presidium included world-renowned outstanding scientists and public figures: A. Einstein, Z. Freud, E. Bernstein, and others. YIVO played an important role in the development of Jewish (Yiddish) philology and the preservation of Jewish heritage in Eastern Europe.

Its English name became the Institute for Jewish Research after moving to New York, but it is still mainly known by its Yiddish acronym. YIVO is now a partner of the Center for Jewish History and acts as the de facto recognized language regulator of the Yiddish language in the secular world. The YIVO system is commonly taught at universities and is known as klal shprakh (Yiddish: כּלל־שפּראַך, literally "standard language"), and sometimes as "YIVO Yiddish" (Yiddish: ייִוואָ־ייִדיש).

YIVO is dedicated to spreading knowledge about the current history of Jewish life, with special attention to the history and culture of Eastern European Jewry — the ancestors of a significant portion of Jews in the modern world.

Sources:

https://www.yivo.org/about-1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YIVO

 

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Jermaine

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