Yiddish Artifacts Rescued in Vilna — Association of Jews of Vilna and vicinity in Israel

In one of their odder and more chilling moves, the Nazis occupying Lithuania once collected Yiddish and Hebrew books and documents, hoping to create a reference collection about a people they intended to annihilate.

Even stranger, they appointed Jewish intellectuals and poets to select the choicest pearls for study.

These workers, assigned to sift through a major Jewish library in Vilna, Vilnius in Lithuanian, ended up hiding thousands of books and papers from the Nazis, smuggling them out under their clothing, and squirreling them away in attics and underground bunkers.

But months ago curators at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in Manhattan, the successor to the Vilnius library, were told that another trove, totaling 170,000 pages, had been found, somehow overlooked in the same church basement.

These documents, experts say, are even more valuable and compelling. Among the finds:

• Five dog-eared notebooks of poetry by Chaim Grade, considered along with Isaac Bashevis Singer as one of the leading Yiddish novelists of the mid-20th century.

• Two letters by Sholem Aleichem, the storyteller whose tales of Tevye the Milkman formed the core of “Fiddler on the Roof.”

• A postcard written by Marc Chagall, the Jewish modernist painter.

“These are gold,” said David E. Fishman, a professor of Jewish history at the Jewish Theological Seminary, who traveled to Vilnius in July at YIVO’s behest to assess the trove’s importance. He came back with the sort of enthusiasm one might find in an explorer who has just discovered unknown lands.

"אוטוביוגרפיה" מאת תלמידת כיתה ה' בבה אפשטיין

Bebe Epstein's diary was also found in the trove:

"When the Nazis invaded Vilna, Beba Epstein—the eldest among her siblings—hid alone in the attic of a gentile military officer’s house whose family lived downstairs. When she stopped receiving news from her family members, she left her hiding spot and was smuggled into the Vilna ghetto to find them. She never did as they had already perished in Ponar. Beba herself was trapped in the ghetto and was ultimately in three concentration camps, including Kaiserwald and Stutthof, from where she was liberated.