Founded in 1980 by 24-year-old graduate student Aaron Lansky, the National Yiddish Book Center was launched as an emergency cultural rescue operation. When Lansky realized that thousands of irreplaceable Yiddish volumes were being discarded as older generations of European immigrants and speakers passed away, he organized a network of volunteer zamlers (book collectors) across North America. Lansky initially estimated there were around 70,000 Yiddish books remaining to salvage; the organization went on to rescue well over 1.5 million volumes from dumpsters, attics, and community basements worldwide. After operating out of ad hoc warehouse spaces in western Massachusetts for over 15 years, the organization opened a permanent, 49,000-square-foot cultural and archival campus in 1997 on the grounds of Hampshire College, designed to evoke the timber-framed architecture of an Eastern European shtetl. Alongside housing physical archives and an active translation fellowship, the Center pioneered major digital accessibility initiatives, partnering with the Internet Archive to digitize and freely provide access to the entire corpus of modern Yiddish literature.