Vilnius University — Center for East European Jewish Studies

At Vilnius University's Center for the Study of East European Jewry, Dr Sergii Gurbych developed 'Vilne-Yiddish', a handwritten-text-recognition model for Yiddish that runs inside the open-source eScriptorium platform. It was trained on 1930s autobiographies sent to YIVO — the Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut — many of them recently rediscovered, undigitised, in the archives of the National Library of Lithuania. The model reaches roughly 95% accuracy, and, unusually for Hebrew-script HTR, both the model and its training dataset are released open-access. A Lithuanian example of open, reproducible HTR unlocking Yiddish documentary heritage that had remained largely unsearchable.