About AHEYM

AHEYM — the Archives of Historical and Ethnographic Yiddish Memories — is a linguistic and oral-history project of Indiana University Bloomington. The acronym spells the Yiddish word אַהיים, homeward.

Between 2002 and 2012 the project recorded some 649 hours of Yiddish-language interviews with about 386 people in 105 towns of Ukraine, Moldova, Romania, Hungary and Slovakia. Most of the interviewees were born between the 1900s and the 1930s; they had lived through the war in ghettos, camps, evacuation or the army, and they stayed in, or returned to, the small towns where Yiddish had been the everyday language. The interviews were led by Dov-Ber Kerler, with Jeffrey Veidlinger, Dovid Katz, Moisei Lemster and other colleagues, and filmed by the project's cameramen.

A typical interview has two parts. It opens with a dialectological questionnaire — a word or a sentence given in Russian, Romanian or Hungarian, which the speaker renders in Yiddish — and continues as a life story prompted by questions on family, childhood, schooling, religious life, holidays, food, work, the war and its aftermath, and the town today. Many interviewees sang; some recited, showed photographs, or walked the team through the town, the synagogue or the cemetery. The recordings therefore hold dialect data, oral history, Holocaust testimony, folk songs, prayers, stories and sayings side by side.

Where the recordings are

The original MiniDV tapes were deposited with Indiana University's Archives of Traditional Music and digitized under the EVIADA preservation project; the Archives catalogued them in 89 collections by locality and described every tape passage by passage. The digitized tapes stream, with those descriptions, from the university's Media Collections Online, which remains the archival copy and the place to cite. In 2026 the project began publishing the recordings on its own YouTube channel and on archive.org, so that they can be watched, searched and downloaded without an institutional login; the song clips went first, the full tapes are following.

This site

This site is the index to the recordings. It is built from the Archives' catalogue — the tape introductions and 8,019 timed descriptions — joined to the project's own song index and to a reading of the questionnaire stretches, and regenerated whenever the index or the uploads change. Every town, person, tape, passage, song and questionnaire item has its own address, so that a moment on a tape can be linked and cited. How the index was made explains what is the catalogue's, what is the project's, and what was done by machine.

Publications

Jeffrey Veidlinger, In the Shadow of the Shtetl: Small-Town Jewish Life in Soviet Ukraine (Indiana University Press, 2013), draws on the interviews from Vinnytsia province, Berdychiv and Uman; Dov-Ber Kerler has written on the Yiddish of the interviews and on their songs; the project's earlier public site, aheym.com, presents selected clips by place, person and subject.

People

Founder and principal investigator: Prof. Dov-Ber Kerler (Indiana University). Co-investigator: Prof. Jeffrey Veidlinger (University of Michigan). This index and the republication of the recordings: Leyzer Burko (Indiana University), with the project's assistants. Questions and corrections: aheym.archives@gmail.com.

The look of the site

The vine with its grape leaves and clusters, the six-petal rosette and the pair of doves that ornament these pages are drawn after the Jewish folk art of the same towns — the carved Torah arks, the gravestones and the painted wooden synagogues that S. An-sky's ethnographic expedition photographed in Podolia and Volhynia in 1912–1914 and that Solomon Yudovin published in Yidisher folks-ornament (Vitebsk, 1920). They are new drawings in that vocabulary, not copies. The type follows the book faces of the region's Russian and Yiddish printing.