Film & Video Archive

A high proportion of the films in YIVO's small Film Archive are unique or rare items. The mostly 16mm and 8mm films in the collection tend to fall into two genres: amateur (home movies) and industrial (community relations films made by Jewish aid organizations). The Film Archives also contains videotapes, most of which are viewing copies of its films.

The most frequently consulted materials in the Film Archives are the approximately 75 home movies made by American Jews during trips to Eastern Europe in the 1920s-30s. The films depict over 25 shtetlekh and smaller towns (mostly in Poland and Lithuania), as well as major Jewish population centers such as Warsaw, Lodz, Cracow, and Vilna. These amateur films constitute rare motion picture records of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. In 2011, Yeshiva University Museum featured these films in an exhibition, 16mm Postcards.

The Film Archive also includes two professionally shot films of prewar Jewish Poland that were commissioned by landsmanshaftn (immigrant mutual aid societies): "A Pictorial Review of Kolbuszowa" (1929) and an untitled film about Szediszow (1935).

The other large body of material in the YIVO Film Archives is the movies made in the 1940s-1960s by Jewish social welfare agencies such as HIAS, the United Service for New Americans, and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Most of these films document the situation of Jewish refugees in Europe, the United States, and Palestine/Israel, as well as the organizational work carried out on their behalf.

Unique films in the collection include:

8mm footage of the Warsaw and Cracow ghettos during World War II, including a fragment of footage shot during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943.
Two short amateur films about Jewish refugees in Shanghai, China in the late 1940s.
A Yiddish-language newsreel of a memorial ceremony for Holocaust victims held in Skierniewice, Poland in 1947.
"A Scientific Expedition to Birobidzhan", a 1929 silent film made by a delegation from Brigham Young University in Utah.
Amateur films made in the 1920s-30s by Abraham Twersky of the Sholem Aleichem Houses in the Bronx, which include images of several notable Yiddish cultural figures.
An amateur film compilation by Moisey Ghitzis of short, silent clips of a number of Yiddish writers and cultural figures in the United States in the 1940s-50s.

For reference questions, to request an appointment to use the Photo and Film Archives, or to order reproductions, contact photofilm@yivo.org. Appointments must be requested at least 1 week in advance. Due to a high volume of inquiries it may take up to a week to receive a response.

Note: YIVO does not rent out or distribute Yiddish movies or any other films. Two excellent sources for Jewish video and film are Ergo Media (Teaneck, NJ) and the National Center for Jewish Film (Brandeis University, Waltham, MA).