YIVO’s New Digital Museum
For close to 100 years, the archives and library of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research have been fostering knowledge and understanding of the on-going story of Jewish life with a focus on the history and culture of East European Jewry. YIVO has pioneered new forms of Jewish scholarship, research, education, and cultural expression and with the launch of one of the organization’s most important projects, the YIVO Bruce and Francesca Cernia Slovin Online Museum in the summer of 2020, YIVO now offers an accessible digital space to share the treasures of its archives through life stories of actual individuals supported by / woven with rare and unique historical artifacts.
Our work with YIVO began in 2019 with the design and development / creation of the inaugural YIVO Online Museum exhibition celebrating the life of Beba Epstein, a young girl born in Vilna, Poland (now Vilnius, Lithuania), whose autobiography – written in 1933 when Beba was 11, was discovered in 2017.
Divided into ten unique experiences, “Beba Epstein: The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Girl” explores East European Jewish life in the 20th and 21st centuries by following Beba’s story for 90 years – from her birth in Vilna in 1922 to her death in California in 2012.
Inspired by a range of historical typography and visual elements, the look and feel of the online museum and the inaugural exhibition is a unique mix of light and dark, color and monochrome, illustration and photography, simplicity and texture.
Designed to present text, historical imagery, maps and hundreds of artifacts from YIVO’s collection alongside an array of custom illustrations, interactive games, activities, animations, multimedia content and 3-D models of Vilna in its 1930s heyday, the interactive exhibition offers a dynamic, multifaceted journey through history for a variety of different audiences. It also serves as an incredibly rich educational resource for teachers and students in grades 3 through 12. While the primary goal of the exhibition is to teach viewers about the Holocaust, many of its chapters can also be used for a variety of different purposes, including learning about American or World history between WWI and the 1950’s; enriching the study of Poland, Germany and Russia from the 1920s through the 1940s; teaching about Jewish life in Eastern Europe before WWII; and helping students develop strong research skills.
Since its launch the Beba Epstein exhibition has been viewed by 50,000 users in 160 countries, and thanks to the generous support of the Lithuanian government is now also available in Lithuanian.
In 2023, YIVO approached us again, this time to develop the second exhibition for the YIVO Cernia Slovin Online Museum based on the life story of Yitskhok Rudashevski, a teenager who lived and died in the Vilna Ghetto during World War II and whose diary was miraculously discovered by a family friend after the end of the war.
Seen through the young boy’s eyes, “Yitskhok Rudashevski: A Teenager’s Account of Life and Death in the Vilna Ghetto” links his personal diary – a window into life in the Vilnius Ghetto – to the larger picture of the world at war chronicling his own and his community’s experiences in the ghetto, offering insights into cultural resistance, moral dilemmas, and the profound perspectives of a young boy in the face of dire adversity.
Designed with a slightly older audience in mind (adults and kids 6th grade and up) and presenting a narrative that is more serious and complex in tone, the Yitskhok Rudashevski exhibition is visually less colorful and less playful than Beba Epstein, and relies less on custom illustrations and more on historical imagery and collage. It too presents a wealth of text, maps, artifacts, historical content alongside interactive features, animations, and a historical timeline.
We chose KMIP for their unparalleled design sense, their professionalism and collaborative spirit. They delivered outstanding results and made the entire process easy. KMIP is a pleasure to work with and we are so happy with the results of our partnership.
– span class="s1">Karolina Ziulkoski, Director of Digital + Chief Curator, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research
Both exhibitions leverage the unique ability of the digital a medium to engage users with storytelling and a multiplicity of interactive experiences, contextualizing artifacts from the YIVO archives and showing the importance of conservation and archival work. Personal stories connect different threads of Jewish life in Eastern Europe and present a larger story: the life of a society, with all its paradoxes, imperfections, changes, adaptations, outstanding and mundane moments. Through its various presentations YIVO Cernia Slovin Online Museum beautifully recreates the life stories of single individuals, thereby immersing the audience in the life of an entire civilization.