National Yiddish Book Center - Collections

Collections

The Center's Yiddish library consists of over a million volumes donated from individuals and collections around the world. However, most of these are multiple copies, and so the number of individual titles is far fewer (approximately 15,000-20,000). Thus while it refers to itself as the world's largest collection of Yiddish books, its holdings include fewer discrete titles than the notable Yiddish collections at the Jewish National and University Library or Harvard University's Widener Library.

The Book Center’s duplicate holdings have been used to strengthen Yiddish collections at more than 450 libraries, including Harvard, Yale, Library of Congress, the British Library, Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and others. Some duplicate books are available for sale to the general public.

In 1998, with a grant from the Righteous Persons Foundation, the Center launched the Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library, which has digitized many works in collection. Through this program, almost 11,000 titles were digitized, catalogued, and made available for free download from Internet Archive. The books also have been made available as print on demand reprints for purchase at $48 a book. The digitization project also led to The Steiner Yizkor Book Collection, containing nearly 700 digitized memorial books about East European communities destroyed by the Holocaust, compiled and written by survivors and previously available only in very limited used editions.