Dina Abramowicz

Dina Abramowicz (1909-2000) was a librarian at YIVO and a Yiddish language expert.¹ Abramowicz was born in Vilnius , then under Russian rule. Her parents were teachers. Though her first language was Russian, when the Germans occupied Vilnius during World War I , they allowed Jews to establish their own schools. Abramowicz's parents sent her to a Yiddish-language elementary and high schools. During her university years she studied Polish literature. Her first job was at a children's library in Vilnius, the Kinderbibliotek. During World War II , Vilnius's Jews were put in ghettos. A librarian, Herman Kruk, organized a library and asked Abramowicz to staff it. "How can we think of a library under these conditions, and who will come to read books there?" she remembered asking a fellow librarian. "Since there was nothing one could do about this absurd situation, what was the use of talking and wondering?" was the response. During its initial year, the ghetto library lent 100,000 books, mostly of escapist fiction to relieve the suffering of the ghetto residents. The Vilnius ghetto was liquidated in 1943. Abramowicz's mother was sent to Treblinka where she was murdered. Abramowicz was to be sent to a labor camp, but when the train car door opened on the Vilnius platform, she walked out unnoticed and made her escape, eventually working in a camp devoted to processing winter coats for the German army. She escaped into the woods and joined Jewish resistance fighters as a nurse's helper. After the war she made her way to New York City where she reunited with her father (who had relocated there prior to the war). There she encounted Max Weinreich , one of YIVO's founders, and together they worked to reconstitute YIVO. She became the head librarian at YIVO in 1962, a position she held until 1987, when she was appointed research librarian, a position she held until her death. People recalled Abramowicz having a phenomenal memory and a knowledgeable source for information.²