In 1980, Aaron Lansky, then a graduate student in Eastern European studies at McGill University, founded the center to save the Yiddish-language books that he saw being thrown — literally– on garbage heaps.
He believed that something precious was being destroyed as the people who read and collected Yiddish books died and their children and grandchildren, having no use for entire libraries in a language they neither spoke nor read, threw them out.
Lansky put the word out to the then-nascent contemporary network of young Yiddishists, and soon the calls started coming in. Lansky would set off in his battered van — even in the middle of the night — to collect books from the dumpster where they had been discarded or the basement where they sat molding in boxes.
Within six months Lansky and other volunteers saved 70,000 books from incineration, storing them in an unheated factory loft and wherever else Lansky could find cheap room: for a while in an old spice warehouse, then in a defunct schoolhouse, later in an empty roller rink.
Today the National Yiddish Book Center owns more than 1.3 million volumes of Yiddish literature.
Another 1,000 pour in each week.
“We want to give Yiddish an address, and provide people a place to come to understand that Jewish culture is not lachrymose, not sentimental, not about the Holocaust, but to understand it on its own terms,’` says Lansky.
“It was chutzpahdik of us to launch a $7 million campaign three years ago when the largest gift we’d ever gotten until then was $10,000, but the response was astonishing.
“Our own members, over 9,300 individual contributors, sent in $2 million.” Lansky said.
The center’s 30,000 members each contribute at least $36 a year, making it one of the largest Jewish cultural organizations in the country.
Much of the collection, and all of the 32 staff members, are settled into their new facility on the campus of Hampshire College. The building’s 37,000 square feet house a state-of-the art auditorium, amphitheater, seminar rooms and a kosher dairy kitchen.
Nine thousand square feet of exhibit space will be devoted to showing collections of art and artifacts, and open to the public in September. Lansky expects 50,000 visitors the first year.
The center will also run programs on various aspects of Yiddish culture, and will continue to provide literature to the burgeoning number of Yiddish research collections.
When Lansky began his work, only six Yiddish-language research collections existed at university and other libraries. Today there are more than 400 universities and national libraries with significant collections of Yiddish literature throughout the world.