The History and Future of the Strashun Library

Conference 1:00pm-4:00pm Admission: $15 YIVO members & students: $10 Read the conference program Watch the video

Matisyahu Strashun (1817-1885), a wealthy book collector, scholar, intellectual, and philanthropist from Vilna, amassed one of the biggest and most important private Jewish libraries in Eastern Europe during the 19th century. His marvelous collection of about 5,700 rare imprints and manuscripts in Hebrew and Yiddish published in Turkey, Greece, Italy, Germany, Holland, Bohemia, and Poland from 15th through 19th centuries (as well as books and periodicals in other languages) became the basis of the great Strashun public library in Vilna – a highly-regarded place for scholarship and study and a Jewish cultural center that functioned from 1901 through 1941. Under the Nazi occupation, the Strashun library as well as YIVO’s library, were taken over, and Jewish intellectuals, among them YIVO associates, were forced to select and crate hundreds of thousands of Jewish books and manuscripts to be shipped to Frankfurt-am-Main to the Institute for Study of the Jewish Question (Institut zur Erforschung der Judenfrage). The books were stored in a warehouse, where they were discovered in 1945 by the American army. About 40,000 books from the Strashun Library, YIVO and other Vilna libraries were brought to YIVO in New York in 1947. As a part of the Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Collections Project to digitize its prewar holdings, YIVO and the National Library of Lithuania are in the process of cataloging and digitizing all of the surviving components of the Strashun private library from their respective collections.

Scholars Brad Sabin Hill, David Fishman, Zachary Baker, Frida Shor, and Jeffrey Veidlinger will discuss topics ranging from the exceptional historical importance of Matisyahu Strashun’s private library, the Strashun library as a “Jewish Public Library," Jewish public culture in the Russian Empire, and the Strashun Library’s survival during WWII and its transition to YIVO. Lyudmila Sholokhova and Roberta Newman from YIVO and Lara Lempert from the Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania will discuss YIVO’s landmark efforts to steward the Strashun library into the 21st century and beyond. 

Due to technical difficulties, part of the tranlated text from Frida Shor’s presentation was not available during the program. You can access the full speech here. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

From Likutei Shoshanim to “the Paper Brigade”: The Strashun Library in Vilna