Minsk Governorate
Archives of the Center for Jewish History - Minsk
The collection holds records of the Minsk Jewish community (Kahal) from 1825-1917. It primarily documents the community’s administration, with key materials on the 1827 Jewish conscription decree and its implementation (1827-1844), community taxes (1825-1908), and vital records (1866-1917).
The files consist of financial reports, petitions, and extensive correspondence between the Kahal and local Russian authorities, offering unique insight into Jewish life and governance in the Russian Empire.
This collection contains records from several Jewish ethnographic organizations in Vilna, covering the period from 1885 through WWII. The main bodies of work are from S. Ansky’s ethnographic expedition (1912-1914), the Society of Friends of Jewish Antiquity (1885-1919), the S. Ansky Jewish Historical Ethnographic Society (1895-1941), and the YIVO Ethnographic Commission (1925-1940). The collection also includes folklore materials from Invayskult in Minsk.
Materials include administrative records (budgets, planning documents, correspondence), museum inventories, and collected folklore (folk songs, tales, proverbs, customs). Addenda contain further unsorted materials, including songs with musical notation and articles by YIVO scholars.
This collection contains materials on Yiddish literature from the 1920s and 1930s, featuring manuscripts, correspondence, and autobiographies from approximately 600 Yiddish writers in Europe and America.
The materials were sourced from Zalman Reisen’s research, the Union of Yiddish Writers and Journalists in Vilna, authors’ personal papers, and Soviet Yiddish academic institutions. Most of the collection is organized by author, with writers typically contributing only a few items. However, materials from the Soviet Union (Series III and IV) are organized by subject and contain more institutional records like minutes and articles. The entire collection was arranged by YIVO in New York in the 1950s.
These subseries consist almost entirely of materials collected by a Minsk memorial book committee formed in New York around 1961, of which Grigori Aronson and Nachum Kantorowicz were secretaries, and S. Lesnick treasurer; the materials comprise correspondence, manuscripts of articles, photographs, and clippings. Also included, at the end (Folder 121), are additional clippings about Minsk from other sources.
Includes a photographic postcard of Minsk synagogue, with a message in Yiddish to J. Kreindel, Paris, 1911; images of a Minsk memorial, 1946; clipping, Zionist conference in Minsk in 1902; image of a letter in Hebrew from a landsmanshaft in Tel Aviv, signed by Moshe Kalyutch and Yehuda Gordon; and images of lithographs by B. Lauvergne, 1840, from a publication.
The topics in this text related to Minsk include:
- A craft school for boys.
- The situation of Jewish children in the khadorim of Minsk.
- Reports on a vocational boys’ school, a vocational girls’ school, and a farming school.
Clippings pertaining to performances in cities including Kishinev (Chișinău), Kremenchug (Kremenchuk), Kutno, Minsk, Odessa, Riga, Warsaw, and St. Petersburg. In Russian and Yiddish. 23 items.
This collection contains the personal and professional papers of Shmuel Niger, including correspondence with many important literary figures, as well as manuscripts by Niger, writings about Niger written by others, Niger’s speeches and lectures, selections from his published writings, and biographical materials. These materials serve to illustrate Niger’s great importance to Yiddish literary criticism and Jewish historical writing as well as his role as a writer on contemporary themes, a teacher and lecturer, editor and communal leaders.