The Yaffa Eliach Collection is one of the largest and most impressive and important private Holocaust-related collections. The collection was shipped to Yad Vashem in more than 500 archival containers weighing over a ton, and was filed as an independent archival division (P.65). Prof. Eliach built the collection over many decades, and it comprises a vast range of materials: individual photographs and photo albums, video and audio testimonies, transcripts, diaries, authentic memoirs and original documents in English, Hebrew, Polish, German, Russian and Yiddish. It also contains different projects of Eliach documenting Holocaust survivors as well as research on Eastern European and Litvak Jewry.
The centerpiece of the Shtetl Collection and its principal focus is the history and fate of Eishishok (now Eišiškės in Lithuania), the birthplace of Prof. Eliach. The impressive scope of the collection allows, on the one hand, one to grapple with the greater questions concerning Jewish life before the Holocaust: how local communities found their paths between tradition and progress, and how they coped with the modern challenges and opportunities they encountered, such as Zionism, Socialism and female liberation. On the other hand, one can grasp all of these issues via an intimate acquaintance with the people who made up the communities: the professionals, family ties, faces and names. For many decades, Eliach collected documentation, photographs, artifacts and testimonies of Eishishok natives from all over the world, and created a vast collection that documents the Jews of the town from the end of the 19th century until the emigration and rehabilitation of its survivors. The more than 6,000 photographs in the collection include a visual testimony of over 90% of the town's population murdered during the Holocaust. Eliach's maternal grandparents were professional photographers and owned a photography studio in the town. In addition to the detailed visual documentation of the town, the family connection to the field of photography provides us with the rare knowledge of the Jews who created the photographs.
The collection regarding Eliach's hometown is one of the first micro-history projects in Holocaust research, and without doubt is one of the most comprehensive and impressive among them. Eishishok is not just "a prototype of a Jewish town in Eastern Europe," but instead a world unto its own, unique among others. The detailed descriptions of the varied, lively and rich life in a not particularly well-known town are fascinating. The perception that thousands of towns and villages like it existed, each one irreplaceable, provides a sharp perspective, and deepens the comprehension of what lies behind the general title, "The Destruction of European Jewry."
The Eliach collection is currently available to researchers and the wider public in the Reading Room of the Yad Vashem Archives.