Khaykl Lunski — Association of Jews of Vilna and vicinity in Israel

Khaykl Lunski was born in 1881(?) in Slonim, Belarus, into a family with rabbinic roots. He attended kheyder and several yeshivas. He settled in Vilna in 1892 and remained there until his death. Lunski perished in the Vilna ghetto, possibly in 1942. Lunski is best remembered today for his role as the librarian and supervisor of the Strashun Library, the Jewish library that was run by the Vilna kehilla (community). He served in this post until the demise of the Library under the Nazis in 1941.

Following the liquidation of the Strashun Library and the YIVO Library, Lunski and other members of Vilna’s Jewish intelligentsia were forced to select and crate thousands of Jewish books and archives for shipment to Germany. Lunski’s papers were presumably mixed with other looted collections.  The papers, together with the volumes from the Strashun Library, were recovered after the war and brought to YIVO in New York in 1947.  

The Khaykl Lunsky Papers are comprised of his manuscripts, correspondence, as well as documents from the administrative files of the Strashun Library and the S. Ansky Historical Ethnographic Society in Vilna. The majority of the papers are in Yiddish and Hebrew.

From: Yivo Archives