The Lithuanian government did not want to surrender what it considers part of its national heritage, but it has agreed to assist in having all 250,000 pages of documents and 4,200 books digitally copied and integrated into a web portal, where they will be available to scholars around the world. The YIVO collection at 15 West 16th Street in Manhattan — an archive of 24 million items that includes the immigrant Jewish experience in America as well as the almost vanished Jewish culture of Eastern Europe — will also be digitized. The project is expected to take seven years.

Image A Nazi stamp in a book in YIVO’s collection. Credit... Michael Appleton for The New York Times

“These materials are Holocaust survivors,” said David E. Fishman, a professor of Jewish history at the Jewish Theological Seminary who is working on a chronicle of the YIVO collection’s rescue. “Like a survivor, these materials were controlled by the Germans. Like a survivor, they were in hiding. The fact that they were saved is miraculous.”

Vilna was known as “the Jerusalem of Lithuania” for both its intellectual and religious eminence, though members of a nationwide community that once numbered over 200,000 Jews — half in Vilna — sometimes speak of it as if it were the Jerusalem of all of Europe. Indeed, YIVO (an acronym in Yiddish for Yiddish Scientific Institute), which was started in 1925 to foster consciousness of the rich 800-year-old history of Eastern European Jews, housed materials from across the continent.

Among the materials that will be made available are many that offer a flavor of how Jews lived: Yiddish theater posters; student geometry notebooks from a Yiddish school, complete with rough sketches; records of synagogues, rabbinical schools, charities, fraternal and professional associations and Zionist movements; early editions of Hebrew books, some dating from the 1500s; the original script of Jacob Gordin’s “Mirele Efros,” a classic of Yiddish theater sometimes known as the “Jewish Queen Lear”; missing script pages from another dramatic classic, “The Dybbuk,” by S. Ansky, in the author’s own hand; and two etchings by Marc Chagall.