Steven Spielberg had already donated money to the Yiddish Book Center when he asked if the center’s founder, Aaron Lansky, might fly out to Los Angeles and drop by his office.

The filmmaker doesn’t usually meet with the beneficiaries of his philanthropy, Lansky told me recently, but wanted to explain his support for what is now the Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library at the YBC, an online collection of more than 12,000 Yiddish titles.

“’You have to understand,’ he said, ‘that what I do for a living is I tell stories,’” Lansky recalls Spielberg telling him. “’The idea that you have miles of Jewish stories that have yet to be told, that’s just irresistible to someone like me.’”

Spielberg may not even have been the first supporter of the Yiddish Book Center to find something, well, Spielbergian about an institution Lansky founded in 1980 as a then 24-year-old graduate student of Yiddish. More than one visitor to the YBC’s campus in Amherst, Massachusetts has compared the shelves and shelves of Yiddish books, rescued from dumpsters and the attics and basements of aging readers, to the colossal government warehouse seen in the closing scene of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

But Spielberg also seemed to understand what has driven Lansky, who is retiring this month as the center’s president. Lansky began by going door to door, asking elderly Jews and their offspring for the books they might otherwise have thrown away. The rescue project could easily have remained a warehouse of old books, dusty treasures moldering in the dark, occasionally accessed by scholars and hobbyists.

Instead, the collection of some 1.5 million volumes is only the foundation of an institution that now includes Yiddish classes, academic fellowships, a training program for translators, scholarly conferences, a publisher of books in translation, an oral history archive, a podcast and that digitized library of both classic and obscure Yiddish books.

“This is not just a matter of collecting books,” said Lansky, 69, recalling that he always had a vision beyond warehousing unread books. “It’s really a whole culture, it’s a whole civilization, it’s a whole historical epoch that needs representation, that wants to tell its story.

“And so after cataloging the books, very quickly, we started offering courses. We started teaching Yiddish language, and to make this world accessible. And that’s just continued ever since.”

Lansky’s decision to step down is both voluntary (his successor is Susan Bronson, the center’s executive director for the past 14 years) and gradual (he announced his retirement 16 months ago, and will stay on........

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