After the destruction of Jewish communities throughout Europe – the encyclopedia's main audience – in the Holocaust, it transformed from a general-purpose resource into an effort to commemorate what was lost.

The outbreak of World War II again forced the editors to flee, and the project regrouped in New York City.

Financed by the Claims Conference, work on the encyclopedia continued into the 1960s; the final volume, Yidn Zayen, was released three years after Abramovitch's death.

In the years following the war, a four-volume English-language encyclopedia titled Jewish People: Past and Present was compiled, largely based on the early volumes of the Yidn series.

Ten of the entries were related to Jewish culture, including articles on Hirsh Lekert, Cantonists, and the Khazars.

Volume One, published in Paris in late December 1934, contains around 1,100 entries, covering topics alphabetically from Aleph to Atlantic City.

Its contents are similar to other general-purpose encyclopedias of the period, including coverage of technological innovations, the natural world, geography, and a large number of biographies.

Topics related to the political left are often written by socialist authors; one of the longest entries in the volume is an article on agrarian socialism by Menshevik Petr Garvi [ru].

[6] It largely follows the previous two volumes in content, featuring a heavy emphasis on leftist history and politics (including lengthy entries on anarchism and anarchist movements).

Yidn Alef, the first of these volumes, consists mainly of essays introducing various Jewish topics written by experts in the respective field.

Compared to Alef and earlier volumes of the Normale series, Yidn Bey featured more contributors from outside of Europe, as well as from a greater ideological range.

The largest essay in the volume is a 100-column article by Shmuel Charney entitled "Yiddish Literature from the Mid-eighteenth Century until 1942".

That year, a group of scholars (previously associated with the Russian Yiddish daily newspaper Der Fraynd) attempted to compile a compact encyclopedia entitled Di Algemeyne Yidishe Entsiklopedye ('The General Jewish Encyclopedia'), which would contain both general knowledge and coverage of Jewish topics.

A similar attempt in the early 1920s by the South African Yiddish publisher David Goldblatt resulted in only one volume.

[25] In March 1930, the editor Nakhmen Meisel published a call for a "great Yiddish encyclopedia" in the literary weekly Literarishe Bleter, arguing that the success of the YIVO, a major Yiddish academic institute, could lay the groundwork for a general encyclopedia for Jewish audiences where previous attempts had failed.

[28] A February 1931 meeting of various prominent Jewish intellectuals in Berlin (including Meisel, Dubnow, Tcherikower, and Shalit) convened to evaluate the plans for the encyclopedia.

While the YIVO would administrate the project in Vilna, the Dunbow Fund would manage day-to-day operations in the center of the Hebrew and Yiddish publishing industries, Berlin.

It predicted the final project would consist of 5000 double-sided pages and 25 million characters, with 40,000 entries[a] ranging from lengthy articles to short descriptions and translations.

A core group of editors (including Abramovitch and Tcherikower) regrouped the Dubnov Fund in Paris, although some contributors had fled to other European countries.

Most copies, roughly a thousand, of the original run of this volume were lost — possibly due to a German U-Boat attack on the ship carrying them — but a small number arrived in the United States and Canada and were reprinted.

[22] Many editors and contributors settled in New York City, with organizational and publishing work carried on by the Central Yiddish Culture Organization.

The refugee editors had brought with them the manuscript for Yidn Giml, along with a small portion of the fund's administrative documents.

The dwindling editorial corps (multiple editors, including Tcherikower, had died in New York) and the mass genocide of the encyclopedia's readership forced an increasing turn away from general knowledge towards fully capturing Jewish culture, religion, and history.

[43] During the late 1940s, focus shifted towards a four-volume English version of the encyclopedia entitled Jewish People: Past and Present, which had been initially conceived before the war.

Anarchist Alexander Berkman drafted an article on anarchism for the first volume of the encyclopedia; this was rejected by the editors as overly political.

[34] Journalist Yeshayahu Klinov, reviewing the probeheft, noted the great potential for the project, writing that if completed, the encyclopedia would "justify our entire Eastern European Jewish Diaspora in Berlin" but questioned whether ten volumes would be enough to provide a proper overview of general knowledge.

[60] Press coverage of the first full volume was extremely positive and supportive, with many hailing the project as a landmark in the history of Yiddish literary culture.

[61] The editorial staff of the encyclopedia had grown increasingly sympathetic towards Zionism over the course of its production; however, they still faced criticism from Zionist academics.

[62] Historian Bernard Dov Weinryb [de] criticized the Yidn editions' focus on the culture of the diaspora the growing Jewish community in Palestine, calling on the editors to recognize that most readers would be "more or less sympathetic toward Hebrew and Zionism or, in any case, not opposed to the movement".

[13] Historian Nachman Blumental criticized a variety of historical inaccuracies and errors regarding Jewish ghettos in the final Yidn volume, as well as hedging and other informalities.