Preserving History

The sepia-toned family portraits displayed on the balcony of the Center for Jewish History looked familiar to Estella and Manus Gass: the stiff posture, piercing eyes, and formal arrangement of the men, women, and children. “All the faces you see are members of the family,” Mr. Gass, a former president of Perugina Chocolates and Confections USA, and an amateur Jewish singer, said.

“This is why we support YIVO,” Mrs. Gass interjected, referring to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, from whose archives the photos were chosen. “It is very important to preserve our cultural history and art.”

A journalist and author, Kati Marton, is drawn to the photographs because she wants to fill a hole in her own history. At age 30, while researching a book on a hero of the Holocaust, Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, she learned that her grandparents were killed in a concentration camp. Her parents had never told her, and refused to allow her to discuss it in the book.

“My parents made an enormous mistake. Children have every right to their own history,” she said. YIVO gives her a chance to get it back, she feels. “I’ve never seen photographs of my grandparents,” she said. “When I come to YIVO, I search egotistically for my own features.”

Ms. Marton, whose most recent book, “The Great Escape” (Simon & Schuster), chronicles the lives of nine Hungarian Jews who fled Hitler, was honored in tandem with her husband, the statesman Richard Holbrooke, at the YIVO Institute’s 82nd annual benefit May 9. YIVO is the keeper of more than 23 million objects related to Eastern European Jewish and American Jewish immigrant history, including 200,000 photographs and 375,000 books. It is one of the most impressive archives in the world, a fact that was abundantly clear to the benefit’s 300 guests, who had an hour to peruse exhibits before the formal program.

A Manatt, Phelps & Phillips partner who is a former commissioner of the city’s Sanitation Department, Steven Polan, examined a case of letters written by Albert Einstein and George Gershwin. Meanwhile, Mr. Holbrooke, a former American Ambassador to Germany and, later, to the United Nations, got absorbed in a case devoted to the papers of Otto Frank, the father of Anne— so much so that Ms. Marton had to pull him away to pose for a photograph with YIVO’s executive director, Carl Rheins, and its chairman, Bruce Slovin.

During the program, Mr. Holbrooke reflected on the documents, letters requesting visas so the Frank family could enter America, and others from government officials who found a way to say no again and again.

“There they are: Those are the real pieces of paper. And they stink of unthinking, unfeeling bureaucrats,” Mr. Holbrooke said. “The details matter: You should read every word.”

“It is easy to think this type of situation couldn’t happen again in 2007,” he said. “Actually, it is happening in Iraq.” He noted the American government had allowed 466 Iraqi refugees into the country, while there are thousands more who want to come, and who already have security clearance, having worked as military interpreters for the Ameican government.

“Like Otto, they can’t get their visas in Iraq because that billiondollar embassy — which I assume will be occupied by non-Americans in the near future, given the way things are going — don’t have access,” Mr. Holbrooke said.

He expressed his disappointment with the Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees, and Migration, Ellen Sauerbrey, for not taking aggressive action to let Iraqi refugees come to America.

After the words came music from the Jewish theater, curated by the Yivo sound archivist, Lorin Sklamberg, whose CD with the Klezmatics, “Wonder Wheel,” with lyrics by Woody Guthrie, won the 2007 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary World Music Album. A performance of the Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick song “Sunrise, Sunset” from “Fiddler on the Roof” on the Theremin was a highlight and perhaps captured the sound of YIVO’s mission: to take pieces of history and make them relevant for future generations.