The project "Digitization of Yiddish Books" covers the safety-filming of this very valuable and rare historic collection of about 800 Yiddish books and offers to the public access for scientific use via the Internet. The "Yiddish Prints" collection is remarkable for its completeness, the impressive number of extremely rare books and several unique editions. The texts were printed in Hebrew letters in West, Central and East Europe. The dates range from the middle of the 16th century to the beginning of the 20th century. Altogether 622 titles have been published before 1900, the rest just after the turn of the century. The oldest book in the collection is a Yiddish translation of the Pentateuch which was printed in 1560 in Cremona, Italy; the next oldest one dates from 1583 and was printed in Basel, Switzerland. In the 17th and 18th century most Yiddish books in Germany were printed in the Frankish area (in Fürth and Wilhermsdorf), the Slesian area (especially in Dyhernfurt, near Breslau) and in the Rhine-Main area (Bad Homburg, Frankfurt/Main, Hanau, Offenbach and Sulzbach). Many Yiddish books of the 17th and 18th centuries originated in Amsterdam, a center for Hebrew and Yiddish printing at that time. In the 19th century most of the Yiddish books were printed in Warsaw, Wilna and other East European cities.

The collection contains the whole spectrum of yiddish books, especially a large number of women's bibles in Yiddish translation, the Tse'ena-Re'ena-literature, and women's prayer books. There are liturgical texts, practical guide books in medicine, science and education, works on religious customs, legends, chronicles and translations of well known tales like "A Thousand and One Nighs". The prints of the 19th and early 20th centuries comprise the classical Jewish fiction of famous East European Yiddish authors like Leib Perez, Sholem Alejchem and Shalom Ash.

The collection belongs to the Frankfurt University Library that owns the largest collection of literature on Judaism and Israel in the Federal Republic of Germany. The project was financed by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the texts were filmed, scanned and projected into the Internet via CD-ROM subcarriers together with a searchable database. There is also access to the texts via the OPAC. The database is so structured that material from other libraries and archives can be incorporated at a later date.