A number of features of the encyclopedia and this website can be useful to researchers. These features include the Synoptic Outline of Contents, Archival Resources, Suggested Reading, and External Links.
Synoptic Outline of Contents
The Synoptic Outline presents the conceptual scheme of the encyclopedia’s organizational and hierarchical structure. Within each conceptual category—Geographical-Political Units, Social History and Politics, Religion, etc.—general, survey-level articles are listed first, followed by more specialized entries and biographies.
View the Synoptic Outline.
Archival Resources
Following the text of many entries, where relevant materials in the YIVO Archives exist, is a list of Archival Resources. These lists have been compiled based on the Guide to the YIVO Archives (1998) and additional unpublished lists of archive groups received more recently.
The resources are listed by Record Group (RG) number, with a link to the online catalog entry for that RG. These catalog entries include all the descriptive information about the RG from the published Guide: name of the collection, dates and extent of the material, and a scope and content note.
Where YIVO has published a more detailed online Finding Aid to a collection, the link is made to the Finding Aid rather than to the online catalog entry.
Researchers looking for images of East European Jewish life may especially wish to consult YIVO’s People of a Thousand Towns Online Photo Catalog, a database that includes 17,000 photographs drawn from YIVO’s archival collections.
Suggested Reading
Each article in the encyclopedia includes a list of suggested readings. These lists are intentionally brief and are not meant to be exhaustive bibliographies. Note that the External Links box to the right of every article is an automatic search window for the catalogs of the Center for Jewish History, which contain YIVO’s Library and Archival collections. Using this box will enable you to find additional publications and unpublished archival material related to the topic at hand.
Scholars who have published or are aware of other new work about the subject of an encyclopedia article are encouraged to inform us so that we may consider adding items to these suggested reading lists.
How to Cite the YIVO Encyclopedia
A "cite this article" button appears at the top of every article. Clicking on this button displays the citation for the article in the three most common formats for citing sources: MLA, APA, and the Chicago Manual of Style. Please cut and paste the appropriate citation into your draft.
External Links
The External Links box may also include links to other sites that are directly related to the subject of an encyclopedia article. Examples include a link from our article on the Warsaw Yiddish newspaper Haynt to www.haynt.org, a website that presents Haynt editor Chaim Finkelstein’s book about the paper in Yiddish and English; a link from Pogroms to a table on the online Museum of Family History that lists pogroms from 1903 to 1906; and many links from biographies of Yiddish writers to lists of full-text books available at the National Yiddish Book Center’s Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library site. We hope to continue to add more of these links to our site and welcome suggestions from interested users.
Below is a list of sites of general interest:
American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio
Bagnówka: galleries of nearly 60,000 images (and select videos) from Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine
Bibliothèque Medem, Paris, France
The Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, Jerusalem, Israel
The Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem, Israel
Centropa: Jewish Witness to a European Century
Dartmouth Jewish Sound Archive, Dartmouth University
Early Hebrew Newspapers, a digitization project of the Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem, Israel
Florida Atlantic University Judaica Sound Archive
Ghetto Fighters' House: Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Heritage Museum, Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot, Israel
Hebrejská knihovna kabalistikých textu (Hebrew Kabbalistic Books)
HebrewBooks.org
Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religions Libraries, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, New York, Jerusalem
Index to Yiddish Periodicals
The Israel Genealogical Society
JewishGen
The Jewish Museum, New York
Jewish Music Resources on the Internet
Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem, Israel
Jewish Public Library of Montreal, Montreal, Canada
Jewish Theological Seminary Library, New York
Jewish Women's Archive, Brookline, Mass.
Judah L. Magnes Museum Library and Archives, Berkeley, California
Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry
Mendele: Forum for Yiddish Literature and Yiddish Language
Michael Davidson Early Hebrew Printing Homepage
The Museum of Family History, The Yiddish World
Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Warsaw, Poland
National Yiddish Book Center, Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library
New York Public Library–Dorot Jewish Division, New York
Penn Libraries Judaica Collections
"People of a Thousand Towns": The Online Catalog of Photographs of Jewish Life in Prewar Eastern Europe
RAMBI, The Jewish National and University Library's Online Index of Articles on Jewish Studies
Robert and Molly Freedman Jewish Sound Archive
Simon Wiesenthal Center Library and Archives, Los Angeles, California
Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C.
Yad Vashem
Yeshiva University Libraries, New York
Yiddish Poetry, Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation, Monash University
Yiddish Sources
YIVOLibraryBooks.org, full digital texts of hundreds of religious and other rare books from YIVO’s collections