Volunteering at the YIVO Archives

by ALYS KREMER

During the seven years I have volunteered at YIVO’s archives, I have seen remarkable things.

In the collection of a German Jewish family that left Berlin in 1940, their Third Reich passports stamped with a big red J. In a collection of research papers concerning my mother’s village in Belarus, eyewitness accounts of the September 1942 murder of the town’s Jews including my great-grandparents.

I feel a deep connection to the documents I review and organize in my work at YIVO. They all tell a story, and sometimes that story comes very close to me.

Currently, I am working under the supervision of Project Archivist Ettie Goldwasser on the extensive archives of the Workmen’s Circle (Arbeter Ring), an organization founded in New York in 1900. The Arbeter Ring continued the mission of the Jewish Labor Bund in the New World.

It is part of my own family story. My father was a member of Tsukunft, the youth movement of the Bund before the Second World War in Grodno, then a part of Poland. And my parents joined the Arbeter Ring not long after their arrival in New York to enjoy the social network and the health benefits. My brother and I learned folk dancing at Camp Kinder Ring in the mid-sixties. As part of a review of the Arbeter Ring files, I smiled when I came upon advertisements for Camp Kinder Ring from that period (“a wholesome setting”).

One afternoon I was amazed to find a letter from the early 1950s about my husband’s great-uncle Benjamin Brandzel, who was a Chicago trade unionist in the garment industry. When my in-laws first arrived in the United States in 1948, Uncle Bennie helped my late father-in-law, Chaim, with his first job at Hart Schaffner & Marx. After Chaim suggested some labor-saving innovations for a machine, Uncle Bennie told Chaim that he was not “worker material.”

Why do I volunteer at YIVO? Because the archives document and bring to life the emergence of Eastern European Jews into the secular world. They celebrate creativity and tell us of the dreams and passions of Jews who lived before us. They are the best possible reminder that the Jews who were murdered during the Second World War were not only victims.

As the daughter and daughter-in-law of Shoah survivors, I have no doubt that YIVO holds our most valuable legacy and offers it to all. That is why you will find me with my sharpened pencil at the YIVO Archives every week.