His photographs were featured in a 2003 exhibition at the YIVO Institute in New York.
He was a founding member of YIVO (Institute for Jewish Research) in Vilna, (then in Poland) starting its Section for Economics and Statistics.
Looted and destroyed by the Nazis from 1941, books recovered after 1945 went to YIVO (20,000 volumes) and the Hebrew University.
Shalit was an active member of the Jewish Scientific Institute, YIVO, which became the Yiddish Institute for Jewish Research.
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In 1925, the fame of Wilno was such that the linguist Max Weinreich and the philosopher Zelig Kalmanovich established themselves there and were at the origin of a major cultural event, the creation of a Jewish Scientific Institute with a largely cultural calling, the YIVO.
In August 1925, along with Max Weinreich and Elias Tcherikover, he helped establish in Vilna the Yiddish Scientific Institute, commonly called YIVO.
Founded at a conference in Berlin, but headquartered in Wilno – a city then in Eastern Poland with a large Jewish population – the early YIVO also had branches in Berlin, Warsaw and New York City.
The conference enthusiastically endorsed the idea, and that date is generally accepted as the founding moment of YIVO.
YIVO |
His direct negotiations with then-President of Lithuania, Algirdas Brazauskas, led to the release, to the New York offices of YIVO for reproduction and cataloguing, of archives that had belonged to YIVO in pre-war Vilna (today, Vilnius, Lithuania), after extensive international coverage of the story.
During 1927 Dubnow initiated a search in Poland for pinkeysim (record books kept by Kehillot and other local Jewish groups) on behalf of the Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut (YIVO, Jewish Scientific Institute), while he was Chairman of its Historical Section.