YIVO in New York has had a separate collection for the Jewish Bund since 1992. Recently they announced a project to digitize that collection to make it accessible to scholars and the public around the world. Vice-chairwoman of the YIVO board Irene Pletka initiated the project and announced she is donating one million dollars to the effort.

More than 150 people came to the YIVO gallery in New York to honor Pletka for her exemplary donation, inspirational generosity and extraordinary sense of duty in preserving Jewish history and culture. After the Bund project receives donations totaling from 2.5 to 3 million dollars the first phase of digitization will begin.

The Bund Jewish political party began in Vilnius in 1897 with a socialist democrat platform and pledge to fight pogroms. YIVO describes the part as a Jewish political party adhering to a social democrat ideology in the context of Jewish culture and seeking Jewish political autonomy. Political science professor Jack Jacobs at Cambridge University in New York says the Bund was the first Jewish political party in Eastern Europe. Bund ideology was aimed at the Jewish working class.

Bund demonstration in Vilnius, 1938.

Pletka is the founder and director of the Kronhill Pletka Foundation which supports secular Jewish culture, Yiddish language and Jewish communities being reborn in Europe and elsewhere.

She was born in Shanghai to Polish Jews who managed to flee thanks to Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara, and grew up in Australia. She speaks several languages and has degrees in psychology and fine arts, and worked as a photographer and designer for 20 years at the Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem. Recently she produced a film about Jewish history.

Pletka has been active in YIVO activities since the establishment of her foundation in 2007 and became vice-chairwoman of the YIVO board in 2011. Her foundation supports projects in Israel, the USA, Australia, Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Serbia, Romania, Italy, Venezuela and various places in Africa, including the restoration of a wooden synagogue in Poland, a Balkan Sephardic music festival and medical treatment for Syrian refugees in Israel.