Yitskhok Rudashevski: A Teenager’s Account of Life and Death in the Vilna Ghetto

YIVO's Bruce and Francesca Cernia Slovin Online Museum uses interactive multimedia storytelling to contextualize hundreds of artifacts from the YIVO archives, making connections between the lives of individuals and the history they lived through. The Museum has been used in classrooms and Holocaust education training programs around the world, including the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, and viewed in over 160 countries. 

There are currently two exhibitions on view, Yitskhok Rudashevski: A Teenager’s Account of Life and Death in the Vilna Ghetto and Beba Epstein: The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Girl. In addition to showcasing their stories, the museum was developed as a teaching resource with accompanying guides and lesson plans for each exhibition. 

Visitors to Yitskhok Rudashevski: A Teenager’s Account of Life and Death in the Vilna Ghetto will learn about life under Nazi occupation in the Vilna Ghetto and cultural resistance through Yitskhok’s diary. The Rudashevski exhibition was designed for 7th to 12th grade students.