Though western European cities like Paris and Berlin had significant Jewish cultural life, the real cultural heart was further east. In Vilna (I will be using the Yiddish or anglicized names, Vilna is Vilnius today) Yiddishists created a society meant to mimic the Academie Francais, it is still active today in New York, they named it YIVO, the Yiddisher Visnshaftlekher Institut, was founded in 1925. They sent out "zamlers" or collectors to go out and photograph and document and record Yiddish and Jewish cultural life, collecting everything from folktales, to sixteenth century, Talmudic commentaries, to newspapers and political pamphlets. They attempted to standardized Yiddish so that Yiddish would be seen as more modern. Kovno, Warsaw, Lublin, Bialystock, Budapest, Iasi, and at least a half dozen other cities were considered centers of Jewish life. Perhaps no city was more central than Warsaw, which on the eve of WWII was about 1/3 Jewish. From the mid-19th century Yiddish literature and theater exploded out of cities like these, and Jewish cultural and communal life in these cities was vibrant and diverse. In the early twentieth century political movements did the same. Warsaw had over a dozen Yiddish newspapers, and Jewish political organizations from the far right youth movement Betar, to the left wing Yiddisher Arbeiter Bund exploded onto the political scene. In 1938 Jewish parties held 20 municipal seats in Warsaw, and over half of those seats were held by the Bund. Just about every large city in eastern and south eastern Europe had Yiddish theater companies, yeshivas, Yiddish language newspapers, and other structures of Jewish life both religious and secular.