By Hallel Yadin
Image above: The cover of a 1931 publication commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Erste Bershader Kranken Unter Verein (roughly translated: First Bershader Sick and Benevolent Association). The Newark, NJ-based group was made up of immigrants from the Ukrainian town of Bershad. From the Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.
Founded in 1925 in Vilna, Poland (today Vilnius, Lithuania), the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City stewards the world’s largest archive and library on Eastern European Jewish history and culture. The subject of this article is YIVO’s landsmanshaftn (singular: landsmanshaft) records. Landsmanshaftn were mutual aid societies formed by Jewish immigrants from the same hometown of origin. They provided social support, as well as material benefits like insurance and burial plots. They were often also responsible for producing yizkor books (post-Holocaust memorial books, often organized by town). Exactly how many landsmanshaftn existed at one time or another is unknown, although estimates for just New York City range from 1,000 to 10,000 [1]. For context, the Yiddish Writers’ Group of the Federal Writers’ Project carried out a survey in the late 1930s and identified 2,468 organizations representing around 400,000 members [2].
YIVO holds records from just over 1,500 landsmanshaftn. The records come from a wide range of sources:
- Record Group (RG) 123: Landsmanshaftn. In the mid-twentieth century, YIVO put out a call for community donations of landsmanshaftn material. Each organization from which material was received was assigned a folder in this collection.
- RG 335.7: Records of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, Landsmanshaftn Department. The American Joint Distribution Committee is a Jewish relief committee which had extensive communication with landsmanshaftn immediately post-World War II.
- Workman’s Circle Chapters. Hundreds of chapters of the Arbeter Ring, a labor and cultural organization that is still in operation today as The Workers Circle, are represented in the YIVO Archives and classified as landsmanshaftn in various YIVO directories. These records are primarily concentrated in two distinct RGs with separate provenances.
- Individual collections’ records, assigned individual RG numbers. Since many of the landsmanshaftn were insurance providers in New York State, when they were dissolved, their records came under the purview of a state agency called the New York Liquidation Bureau (NYLB). We have received hundreds of organizations’ records from the NYLB.
Thus, the “landsmanshaftn records” are scattered throughout the archive. These collections have historically been quite popular, particularly with genealogy researchers. In 2021, I set out to create a resource that would make them easier to navigate.
I had several goals for this project. First of all, the primary users of these collections were genealogy researchers. While many genealogy researchers are well-versed in the historical context of the town they are investigating, I found that a meaningful proportion would get stalled searching for the “wrong” town, not realizing that an alternative spelling was more commonly used. Furthermore, the collections were under-utilized outside of family history research. The landsmanshaftn records are rich sources for social historians, immigration historians, and more, and they were rarely being accessed by anyone outside of family history researchers. I hoped that having this resource, and doing some publicity around it, would increase interest more broadly.
Challenges with the Records
The first problem was a general lack of intellectual control. Beyond having no formalized “landsmanshaftn collection,” many of the more recent accessions were sitting in our backlog. Therefore, the first step was compiling a spreadsheet with every landsmanshaft I could identify in the collections, processed or not.
Also, much of the description that was available was not discoverable. What finding aids we did have were not electronic, but scanned PDFs linked to collections’ records in Primo, which hosts our catalog. It was not intuitive to patrons that the way to access information about landsmanshaftn records was to navigate to the appropriate collection in the catalog, scroll, click for the scanned PDF, then read through it to see if the organization in question was represented.
Beyond that, I wanted to organize each resource by town, not collection. As importantly, I wanted to provide variant spellings for each town. In general, European town names have numerous possible spellings in English. There are extra layers to this with Jewish towns, or shtetls. For one, people often referred to shtetls by their Yiddish names, but Yiddish did not necessarily make it into official record-keeping. More difficult, of course, is the fact that so many Jewish towns were obliterated during the Holocaust, leaving limited traces in the historical record.
Doing the Project and Using ArchivesSpace
In order to carry out the project, I secured a $3,000 grant from the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies, which I used to hire two research assistants. Their first step was to identify the town of origin for every landsmanshaft represented in our collections, based on the spreadsheet I had compiled. Many of the organizations were named after the towns of origin, or had some level of description available, and the interns did a first round of identification remotely. However, for many records, there was no description, or the name of the organization was ambiguous. For those, the interns came on-site to ascertain the town of origin based on organizational records.
Then, for every town that had been identified, the interns determined variant town names and spellings. They used a variety of sources for this:
- Library of Congress Subject Headings. Where the town had an LCSH entry, we deferred to it, although we added additional variant spellings if they were meaningfully in use.
- Jewish genealogical resources. Major sites like JewishGen were helpful.
- YIVO’s sources. YIVO has undertaken a number of relevant projects throughout its history, including Yiddishland: Countries, Cities, Towns, Rivers.
- Reference books. There are a number of books dedicated to this topic. Gary Mokotoff, Sallyann Amdur Sack, and Alexander Sharon’s Where Once We Walked: A Guide to the Jewish Communities Destroyed in the Holocaust was especially useful.
Of course, doing this work in summer 2022, it was not lost on us that borders were shifting in real time as Russia invaded Ukraine. We decided to maintain the system we were already using — primarily deferring to LCSH — but it certainly reiterated the importance of providing as full a historical picture as possible within the limited confines of a finding aid.
Once the research assistants had compiled all of this information, I built out a resource in ArchivesSpace that compiled all of the landsmanshaftn represented in the YIVO Archives in one place. First and foremost, I set each town as a series on hierarchical level one. I also included the current-day country in parentheses. Thus, researchers could easily scroll through the finding aid and see all of the towns available. We included all variant spellings as Biographical/Historical notes on the series level. This way, no matter what a researcher searches, the correct series should be returned.
We also assigned a subject to each series. The subject is the most “authoritative” name for the town. When available, we used the LCSH spelling, and, if not, the research assistants used their judgment about the spelling most commonly used in English-language published sources. The subjects are local subjects that were created in our ArchivesSpace instance upon the ingest of the archival records into the resource. While we’re not currently doing anything with these subjects, we now have the groundwork laid to build them out further and connect genealogical material across collections.
The organization name for each landsmanshaft is included as a “file” under the appropriate series (a.k.a. town name). The information on the collection which contains the record is recorded as a physical location note. If an organization has records across multiple collections — for example, if there was already a folder in RG 123, and we subsequently received liquidation materials that were assigned their own RG number — the record simply has multiple physical location notes. It’s not quite the “accurate” use of ArchivesSpace, but thus far, our patrons have found it very navigable and useful.
Looking to the Future
There are two projects that we are considering undertaking to expand the navigability and use of these records, though we have not yet been able to take them on.
One is replicating the data in a different platform, perhaps AirTable, which is easier for users to manipulate and allows them to download data for their own purposes. This would likely appeal to users who are not doing genealogical research but general research on landsmanshaftn, and who are thus more interested in “big picture” research.
Another potential project would be to make use of the subjects we created locally with this project. For instance, our ArchivesSpace instance is equipped to use WikiData as an authority. Perhaps there is an opportunity to submit the subjects to WikiData, which would make them useful outside of our institution, and then link those subjects locally to the WikiData subjects, which would further our goal of moving toward linked data overall.
We plan for this to be a living resource, reflecting the dynamic nature of our landsmanshaftn collections and our continual investment in enhancing their description.
[1] Daniel Soyer, Jewish Immigrant Associations and American Identity in New York, 1880-1939 (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2001), 1.
[2] Ibid.
Hallel Yadin is an archivist & special projects manager at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City. She holds an MLIS with an emphasis in archival studies from the University of Missouri and a BA in history from Rutgers University.