Moshe Shalit

He wrote monographs, book reviews and articles in many Yiddish language publications, which were abundant at the beginning of the 20th century.

The armed groups took control quickly and began a systematic program of violence against the city's Jewish population including razing, savage attacks, torture and killings.

When calm was restored, the "wise men" of the community, including Shalit (then 34 years old), were called together to re-establish peace in people's minds.

Studies by Shalit on prominent Yiddish writers such as Mendele Mocher Sforim, Sholem Aleichem, Isaac Leib Peretz and Daniel Bergelson appeared in collection.

Wilno became the beacon of Jewish intellectual life, invigorated by the sheer diversity of its characters: from Hebraists, expert Biblical commentators and disciples of the Gaon to Marxist theorists, Yiddish language militants, Trotskyist dissidents and the anti-Zionist socialists of the Bund.

Academy and university at the beginning, it felt obliged additionally to welcome all those who, through their work, had participated in the spreading of Yiddish culture.

Zalman Reisen, philologist and great Yiddish propagandist, set to work making the known the goals of the institution.

Four departments were created within the institute: In 1936, after a large amount of work and numerous investigations, YIVO established laws and conventions for the Yiddish language, based on Polish and Lithuanian usage.

Furthermore, research was to be conducted by modern methods and recent innovations of the human and social scientists into a better understanding of Jewish identity.

[8] Shalit's ethnographic studies outside the Economy and Statistics department referred to the situation of the Jews of Poland and the recent past.

Philosophers, poets, artists, scientists, political militants, artisans, and shopkeepers all spoke Yiddish—and not just exclusively in the Jewish area around Zydowska and Straszuna streets.

It has been estimated that, before the Second World War, there were approximately 11 million Yiddish-speakers in Europe and the two principal destinations for immigration, the United States and South America.

During the Second World War, the Nazi authorities solicited Shalit to sit on the Judenrat, the consultative committee designed by the occupiers and formed of prominent Jews from the city's two Jewish Ghettos.

[2] Shalit's wife Deborah and their youngest daughter Ita were killed several months later in Belorussia where they had fled.