"Yiddish does not offer the path to the past as much as to a collective future which is linked with the past: a better future, but better because of human endeavour. The library at the Vancouver Peretz Institute is one such endeavour."
-- Faith Jones, “The Vancouver Peretz Institute Yiddish Library,” p. 140
Our Collections in Yiddish & English
Browse & Search the Catalogue
The Kirman Library at the Peretz Centre is a unique library with a treasure trove of Jewish literature, history, music, art, theatre, humour and scholarly works in Yiddish and English. The library’s Yiddish collection is the largest in Western Canada.
Our library catalogue is available to browse online via Library World.
Visit the Kirman Library
The library is open to all. While we work to establish regular hours, access to the library is by appointment only.
For more information about library policy, including overdue or lost items, or to obtain a library card, contact the Peretz Centre office at 604-325-1812, or e-mail admin@peretz-centre.org.
About the Kirman Yiddish Library
Paulina Kirman photographs sub-series, 94.01.0058. Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, Survivors Today project fonds. © Celia Brauer.
Paulina Kirman photographs sub-series, 94.01.0058. Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, Survivors Today project fonds. © Celia Brauer.
Paulina Kirman photographs sub-series, 94.01.0058. Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, Survivors Today project fonds. © Celia Brauer.
Paulina Kirman photographs sub-series, 94.01.0058. Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, Survivors Today project fonds. © Celia Brauer.
"Paulina Kirman's dedication to the project of creating an ordered library from a room full of books is the single greatest reason for the library's existence. She believed strongly in the goals of librarianship, particularly equal access to information and dissemination of culture."
-- Faith Jones, “The Vancouver Peretz Institute Yiddish Library,” p. 130
Paulina Kirman (1919-1999) emigrated to Vancouver from Poland in 1958. She and her husband Shaya (1903-1982) were devoted readers and Yiddishists. A polyglot who knew Yiddish, Hebrew, Polish, Russian, German, Latin, and several other Slavic languages, Paulina was hired to catalogue books for the University of British Columbia's Slavic department in 1962, where she worked for 22 years.
Paulina and Shaya started a Yiddish reading group at the Peretz Institute in 1972. In 1976, the couple started organizing the Peretz School's book collection into a working lending library, with Paulina cataloguing and classifying the texts and Shaya assisting her. The library officially opened on January 21, 1979 with a visit from the Yiddish writer Itche Goldberg.
Securing donated reference texts and literature from UBC, Paulina actively participated in the Yiddish literary world and the library became a member of the League for Yiddish, YIVO and the National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts, USA. Over the decades, the library amassed a collection of Yiddish books, literary journals, magazines, and more. Most of the books in the library were donated by Peretz members like Archie and Anne Wyne, and Sid Sarkin, with many families donating personal collections of loved ones after their deaths.
Paulina retired from UBC not long after her husband Shaya's death in 1982 and devoted more of her time to the Peretz library until her health began to decline. At this point, the library's collection of English language books also began to grow to support the Peretz School's programs, including a large number of children's books and Holocaust books.
In the 1990s, Faith Jones began volunteering at the library and started work restoring the library with David Kaetz. Many other organizations that closed (like Calgary's Peretz School) or downsized their collections (like UJPO's Toronto branch or the Winnipeg Jewish Library) sent their books to the Vancouver Peretz School, and the collection continued to grow with large donations from the late Dr. Gersh Winrob and the late poet Miriam Waddington, among others.
"The maintenance of a Yiddish language library in Vancouver, against all odds, can only be ascribed to a certain stubbornness of spirit on the part of a few individuals. The Peretz community continues to insist on the importance of a Jewish past which most Jews -- including its own members -- cannot access directly. That this past will inevitably be filtered and condensed due to translation, and that it will need constant re-examination in order to keep it a living and sustaining component of Jewish identity, does not reduce its power. Unlike those who declare Yiddish already dead, the Peretz School's members do not appear to need closure on this question."
-- Faith Jones, “The Vancouver Peretz Institute Yiddish Library,” pp. 138-39
In 2001, when the Peretz Institute re-opened its new building under the new name of the Peretz Centre for Secular Jewish Culture, the library was a central feature of the plan and was named after Paulina and Shaya. In its new space, more volunteers stepped in to care for the diverse collection of texts, which was disorganized and dispersed in boxes. Al Stein led the effort to restore the library over the next two decades and more. With a grant from the Jewish Community Foundation of Greater Vancouver, the Peretz Centre was able to hire a library technician to digitize the library catalogue. This was an enormous undertaking, especially for a library tech unfamiliar with Yiddish, and the project relied on the support of Al and other volunteers to meticulously transliterate book and journal titles.
Containing a treasure trove of 4000 books and journals in Yiddish and English, the Kirman Library is under the care of Al and Carl Rosenberg (former editor of Outlook magazine). We are working to reopen the library with regular hours and more funding to honour the work of Peretz members and all of the history and memory contained in its pages.
References & Further Reading
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Faith Jones, "The Vancouver Peretz Institute Yiddish Library: The Social History of a Jewish Community Library," UBC Thesis (Master's of Library and Information Studies), 1999.
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Faith Jones, "A Chimney on the Canadian Prairies: Yiddish-Language Libraries in Western Canada, 1900 to the Present," Judaica Librarianship, vol. 12, 2006.
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"Kirman Library spans the arts," Jewish Independent, February 26, 2001.
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Al Stein's Oral History, Yiddish Book Centre's Wexler Oral History Project (interviewed by Christa Whitney, 2023).
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Paulina Kirman testimony, Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre (interviewed by Sandra Hayden, 1985).
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Paulina Kirman Collection at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre.
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