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About the Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library
The Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library was launched in 1998 by a major grant to the Yiddish Book Center from Steven Spielberg through his Righteous Persons Foundation. In awarding the grant, the Foundation’s Rachel Levin said, “Yiddish literature is a gateway into a world that was lost during the Holocaust. Over fifty years after the war, a new generation is beginning to realize how cut off we are from our recent history….In many ways, this project complements the work of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, also supported by Steven Spielberg, which has collected oral testimonies from tens of thousands of survivors. Our hope is that both projects will help us better know a piece of our past and enable us, as a diverse community, to move into the next century with a more complete sense of what we are and where we came from.”
The Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library is believed to be the only project ever to digitize an entire modern literature, preserving it permanently for future generations of readers, students, and scholars. The project began when diminishing supplies of popular Yiddish titles made it increasingly difficult for the Center to fill requests for important books. In addition, our collection of 1.5 million books was physically deteriorating, as pages and bindings yellowed and crumbled. With the help of state-of-the-art technology, every title in the Center’s collection has now been scanned, page by page, creating permanent computer files that can be readily reprinted, on demand, as high-quality, affordable new books.
To view the on-line catalogue, see Books in Yiddish.
For more information about the Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library, contact orders@bikher.org
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