This exhibition tells the story of YIVO, the Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut, founded in Vilnius in 1925 as the first institution dedicated to studying the Yiddish language and the Jewish culture of Eastern Europe on its own terms. It explores how a community set out to record and dignify its own life – its language, its scholarship, its folklore, and the everyday experiences of ordinary people – and built, in fifteen short years, an internationally connected centre of Jewish learning. The exhibition traces the rich and complex legacy of Jewish life in Lithuania before, during, and after the Holocaust: a culture in full flourish, its near-total destruction during the Second World War, and its survival and continuation beyond Europe. Above all it is a reflection on memory, loss, and the endurance of a culture that was very nearly destroyed – and on why a people’s determination to preserve its own story still matters.