It is a well-known fact that Sholem Aleichem never came to Israel and Palestine. He died in 1916, and this house was opened in 1966. Sholem Aleichem’s son-in-law and the famous Hebrew writer Yitzhak Dov Berkowitz opened it. He was a known popularizer of Sholem Aleichem’s works, and he was the main translator of his works into Hebrew.
After the death of Sholem Aleichem, his personal archive was inaccessible in one of the banks in America. Berkowitz did not quite like that, and he wanted the archive to be located close to him, and he was an Israeli writer. The archive moved here. They appealed to donors and collected enough funds for the construction of this institution here. Since then, it has been an archive for Sholem Aleichem and Berkowitz, an archive of everything that was written about them, a library, an exhibition hall, and a publishing division.
Since 1998, when Hebrew University professor of Yiddish Avraham Novershtern became the director, another important aspect has become central now: the study of Yiddish, Yiddish culture, and everything that is connected to the heritage of Eastern European Jews.
