Leyzer Ran

Return to "Jerusalem of Lithuania": A Stroll through the Leyzer Ran Collection Archive/by Mordechai [Motti] Zalkin

As mentioned, Leyzer Ran aspired to preserve all the features found in the human gallery of the Jewish communities. Tis is the background, for example, for the many documents whose subject is the world of the cantors who lived and worked in the Jewish community of Eastern Europe. Likewise, the world of the children of the shtetl also found a place in this archive. An interesting collection of children’s games and children’s songs is found in the material that Kalman Mendel from the town of Shkodvil in Lithuania collected in 1933. Tis material is important for many reasons, including the fact (noted by Mendel) that the material for this collection of children’s games and songs was gathered from diﬀerent towns in Lithuania (Kleme, avrig) and it presents a unique aspect of the world of the Jewish children in the last decade of the nineteenth century.

Education

This section contains many documents dealing with diﬀerent aspects of the Jewish educational systems in Eastern Europe, mainly in the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century. A few of them deal with theoretical aspects of Jewish education of that time, such as a long article by Pinhas Shifman entitled: “The main deﬁciency in our educational institutions.” In this article the author analyzes at length and in detail the major problems confronting the Jewish educational system in Europe during the period under discussion. His impression was that the ﬁrst stage on the road to solving these problems was “to develop and deepen our national recognition of our educational problem. ”However, most of the documents in this section deal with the practical aspects of the Jewish educational system. An example of this is a batch of rare and extremely interesting applications to various educational institutions from female and male teachers seeking teaching jobs. Curricula vitae are attached to these requests, making it possible for us to monitor both the social-cultural background of many job-seekers as well as the training of Jewish teachers in Eastern Europe in the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century. In the curriculum vitae attached to his request, A. Meirovits describes the complicated world of the Jewish child, torn between “the strength of the father and the thick leather strap in his hand, and the strength of the mother who seeks to tear up the verdict of father.” A typical example of the lengthy and exhausting process of training that these teachers went through is exempliﬁed by the teacher Ester Bulkin. Her studies included participation courses organized by “Yehudiyah” (1918) and in the educational system of “s.B.K.” (1921); training in craftwork in oﬃcial courses (summer 1921); studies in the Vilna gymnasium for girls headed by Sima Gurevitch (1922); as well as studying sewing for over a year and a half in the framework of the organization “Help through work.” At the same time, the writer also describes the experience she gained in her work in the kindergartens of the Y. L. Perets School, in “Grininke Boymelekh,” in the “TOZ” organization, and in additional educational systems. The collection also reveals the diﬃcult ﬁnancial situation of many of the teachers in Vilna. We ﬁnd in a report that was prepared by “The Association of the Hebrew Teachers in Vilna” a list of eighty male and female teachers, members of the association, who were “in need of matzos” for Passover. A collection of documents like these enables the researcher to sketch the collective proﬁle of the teachers who worked in the various educational systems in that period. A large group of documents deals with the world of the Yeshivot in Eastern Europe that was destroyed in the Holocaust. Among these documents is a letter by Rabbi Barukh Dov Leybowitch who admits to the Vilna librarian Haykel Lunski that he established a charitable fund for the “Kneset Beit Yitshak” Yeshivah in Slobodkah, in Kovna. A most important overview of this subject is provided to there searcher through “A questionnaire on the status and quality of the Yeshivot” in the years 1921-1936,and through a list of the Yeshivot that were active in the Lithuanian-Jewish cultural sphere in 1940.

Press

Leyzer Ran attributed great importance to the press in its various forms as a tool for learning about the world of Eastern European Jews. For that reason Ran included in his archive many hundreds of newspaper clippings, as well as Yiddish and Hebrew documents dealing with periodicals that appeared in the Lithuanian-Jewish sphere between the two World Wars. For example, there is a letter from the poet Saul Tchernikhowski and the historian Ben-Zion Katz to the editors of the periodical Netivot (October 1927), in which they respond to the editors’ request to publish an announcement supporting the periodical and its distribution among the Hebrew-reading public in Eastern Europe. In this context, a letter from Aba Ben Aba, of the town of Libau on the Baltic Sea shore, to Nathan Grinblat, one of the editors of

Netivot, is especially interesting. In this letter, from 1930, the writer laments: “To whom will I turn with my rhymes where I will be so understood? Woe to me, for in my pain I say Oy! And neither vu normu to meet the needs of the time and of art.”

Letters

In this section is found Leyzer Ran’s correspondence with various Jews throughout the world. It includes letters from the period of his activity in Vilna before the war, as well as letters written to collect the memories of Holocaust survivors. Among the former are, for example, a letter that Ran received in 1926 from the poet Yitshak Katsenelson, and among the latter, proliﬁc correspondence with Hayim Gvati for the purpose of collecting material on Gvati’s family history in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. An additional interesting letter was sent to Ran in the early 1950s by Judah David Eisenstein, author of the various “Otsarot” (“Encyclopedias”).

General Historical Documentation

Anyone who has experience with archival research is aware of the possible existence of documents that would shed light on unknown historical events. In this respect the Leyzer Ran archive also surprises the researcher quite often. Tus, for example, we ﬁnd a document from 1937 detailing a joint initiative from the heads of ORT, TOZ and the charity fund in the town of Kremenitz in Volhynia to erect a monument to Isaac Ber Levinson, “The father of the Jewish Enlightenment” in the Russian empire, by converting his modest home into a museum, library and reading room. Similarly, the collection includes a translation into Hebrew of the Lithuanian anthem that was prepared especially for the Hanukka celebration in the Hebrew gymnasium in Kovna in 1921. A diverse human gallery emerges from the many autobiographies that Ran collected, such as those of Moshe Zaltsman, the Jewish writer and Communist; of the writer and translator Nehamah Tsiyonson; and of Mikhl Ivenski and Abraham Ivenitski.

Pictures

Most of the drawings and pictures that Ran had, or that were lent to him by others, were published in the two volumes of

Yerushalayim de-Lita. Nevertheless, there remain in the archive drawings and pictures that were not published, including a heart-rending scene of a Jewish soldier taking leave of his family before his departure to serve in the Russian army.

Autobiographical material

Leyzer Ran was one of those tireless collectors who save every piece of paper, regardless of how small its importance may be. Tus, the Leyzer Ran collection makes possible a detailed reconstruction of the complex and stormy life of the archive’s owner. Tis documentation begins with an autobiography in his own handwriting, and extends to materials from his activity in Eastern Europe immediately after the war and from the period of his activity in Cuba as a representative of YIVO. It includes articles that he published in various newspapers (e.g., Havaner Lebn), material dealing with the Manger Prize that he received in 1981, and also with his many years of activity in YIVO and in various organizations of Jews from Eastern Europe, Lithuania, and Vilna. Until his last days Leyzer Ran seemed to live in two worlds: the world of the present, in which he lived and worked to preserve the culture of East European Jewry, and the world of the past, the world of his city—Jerusalem of Lithuania. As he put it: “I am a sabra from the Vilna Jerusalem of Yiddish.” Thus , a “stroll” through the Ran archive is very much like a journey through the alleys of the Jewish centers of Eastern Europe before the Holocaust, as Hayim Leyb Fuchs described it in his poem “Vilne,” which is found in Ran’s archive: You are a book. I read from every stone the words That I stuttered in my childhood-dream. On your crooked streets I feel at home, And mine are your mountains and valleys. Everything that has been described above is but a little of what this rich and varied archive contains. In addition to these, the researcher will ﬁnd many documents dealing with an array of the social, economic, religious, political and spiritual aspects of the Jews of Eastern Europe. It is no exaggeration to say that this archive is just as signiﬁcant as other well-known archives that deal with the life of Jews in Eastern Europe, such as the YIVO Archive, the Shaul Ginsburg Archive in the manuscript department of the National Library in Jerusalem, and the collections uncovered in recent years in the various archives of Eastern Europe.

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