Oct 31, 2019
Outside of a pamphlet advertising a masquerade ball in Warsaw, 1925, held to raise money for the OZE (Obshchestvo okhraneniia zdorov’ia evreiskogo naseleniia), a Jewish-sponsored public health organization. Courtesy of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.
INTRODUCTION
I found this pamphlet in YIVO’s legendary RG8 called The Esther-Rachel Kaminska Theater Museum Collection, one of YIVO’s original Vilna Collections.
The collection began as a theater museum opened in 1926 in Warsaw to honor the legendary Yiddish actor, Esther Rachel Kaminska. Its founders, the Yiddish actors Ida Kaminska and Zygmunt Turkov, donated it to YIVO in 1927 and Max Weinreich and others went to great efforts to grow the collection. Grow it did! YIVO gave the the collection its own dedicated exhibition room and a staff of eight managed the collection and exhibition space. A few years ago, I was hired to survey the collection. It includes over 100 feet of material, which does not include its formidable poster collection now undergoing conservation and materials discovered in Lithuania over recent decades. All of this will be available digitally over the coming years. To be published soon: an online exhibition called A Tale of Two Museums about the museum origins of this important collection of Yiddish theater documents and the milieu of interwar Polish-Yiddish art theater that gave rise to it.
This treasure jumped out at me at the very beginning of my survey, as if to remind me of just how much fun I was having. It is a Yiddish pamphlet that circulated in 1925 Warsaw to advertise an annual masquerade ball held to raise money for the OZE (Obshchestvo okhraneniia zdorov’ia evreiskogo naseleniia), a Jewish-sponsored public health organization. With Halloween upon us, it’s good to know other communities of other eras took costuming seriously.
Inside of the pamphlet. Courtesy of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.
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The Vilna Society of Health of the Jewish Population
The Hall of the Commerce and Industrial Club
Masquerade Ball
January 23 1925
Assembly 10 o’clock in the evening
Motto:
1) Everyone must come well-rested, dead hungry, and faint with thirst
2) Attending the Masquerade Ball and conducting oneself according to the laws is the best way to preserve one’s health from sickness (from depression, certainly) for an entire year; until the next masquerade ball of the OZE
Program
Balu Maskowego
“OZE”
w salach klubu Nandlowo-Przemyslowego
