The YIVO Origins of the Oyneg Shabes Archive: Understanding the Documents of the Hersh Wasser Collection
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Lecture
Co-sponsored by the Jewish Historical Institute, the Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, and Polish Cultural Institute New York Admission: Free Registration is required. |
The Oyneg Shabes archive that Emanuel Ringelblum organized in the Warsaw Ghetto was one of the most successful examples of cultural resistance in all of Nazi-occupied Europe, a reminder that Jews could fight with paper and pen as well as with guns. Ringelblum did all he could to make sure that even if the Jews of Poland did not survive, posterity would remember them on the basis of Jewish and not Nazi documents.
But Ringelblum’s archive did not arise in a vacuum. No single institution had more of an impact on its ethos than the pre-war YIVO. Many key members of the archive, including Emanuel Ringelblum, Yitzhak Giterman, Hersh Wasser, Shmuel Winter, Rachel Auerbach, and Menakhem Linder had been YIVO activists.
After the war, Wasser, one of only three survivors of the archive staff, and fearful of what would happen to Jewish life in Stalinist Poland, managed to smuggle copies of many rescued documents to the YIVO in New York. This talk by Samuel Kassow will discuss the contents of YIVO’s Hersh Wasser Collection and the insights it offers into the workings of the Oyneg Shabes archive.
This program is in held in conjunction with Will These Words Reach You? The Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto, on view at the Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, September 18, 2026 – February 14, 2027. This exhibition was created on the initiative of the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw, in partnership with the Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust with the support of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.
About the Speaker
Samuel Kassow, Charles H. Northam Professor of History at Trinity College, holds a PhD from Princeton University and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Jewish Research. From 2006 until 2013, he was the lead historian for two galleries of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, which opened in 2014. Professor Kassow is the author of Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum and the Secret Ghetto Archive (Indiana University Press, 2007), which received the Orbis Prize of the AAASS; was a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award; and has been translated into eight languages. White Goat Press recently published his translation of Warsaw Testament by Rokhl Auerbach, which received a National Jewish Book Award. A child of Holocaust survivors, Professor Kassow was born in a displaced-persons camp in Germany.