דער קאמיטעט פון "יעקאפא" ווילנע - Komitet "IKOPO" w Wilne

IKOPO, the Vilnius branch of EKOPO (Evreiskii Komitet Pomoshchi Zhertvam Voiny or Jewish Committee for the Relief of War Victims), was among the most prominent Jewish organizations in interwar Vilnius. It was a relief organization, founded in Russia following World War I, that organized extensive relief activities among Jewish refugees and victims of war in Russia and in areas of Russian occupation. After the revolutions of 1917 in Russia, several branches of EKOPO continued their activity. They were engaged in relief activities among the Jewish casualties of the Russian civil war and took part in the restoration of Jewish communities in different parts of Eastern Europe. During the interwar period, the scope of the society's activity in Vilnius and its region was gradually narrowed due to the establishment and development of specialized Jewish organizations in the fields of education, healthcare and immigration. One of its major fields of activity in the late 1920s and the 1930s was the organization and supervision of Jewish interest-free loan funds, subsidized by the JDC and other organizations. The collection comprises materials of IKOPO detailing its various relief activities: data on IKOPO's engagements in the field of Jewish education; questionnaires concerning social and financial matters; account books; protocols from the meetings of IKOPO's general assembly and its control commission meetings; circulars from the society's governing board and other administrative papers; applications for membership of IKOPO and lists of the society's members; data on the periodical Unzer Hilf, issued by IKOPO; correspondence with foreign Jewish organizations such as JDC, JCA, OZE and HIAS; and Jewish organizations’ in Poland (schools, loan funds, orphanages, relief societies, e.t.c.). Certain files comprise materials from the period after the outbreak of World War II, after the annexation of the city and its environs to Lithuania: data on the areas of Poland under Nazi occupation and on relief activities among refugees of war between late 1939 and mid-1940 -- Read more