100 years after its founding, can a Yiddish institute serve a people who don't speak the language?
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The YIVO institute, an archive, library and research institution on Eastern European Jewish civilization, recently encountered a novel problem in its 100 year history.
In its early days in Europe, the Institute for Jewish Research was the first organization to seriously undertake a standardization of Yiddish spelling. It survived World War II — with some of its staff smuggling its artifacts back to the Vilna ghetto. In America its scholars helped create the field of Jewish studies and launch the klezmer revival. It lived to see the reunification of its collection with the collapse of the Soviet Union. But it had seldom encountered a very late-20th-century issue: Wingdings.
“Do you think I should throw it out?” asked Jessica Podhorcer, a project archivist, in her corner of the third-floor warren of desks, side rooms and gray, carbon-free boxes where millions of documents were being sorted.
She was processing a 1999 web forum for a reunion of Camp Hemshekh, a Holocaust survivor-founded camp in upstate New York that shuttered in 1978. Whole pages of it were in the nonsense, dingbat font of Wingdings — a Space Invaders-like glyph here, a proto emoji there.
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