Weinberg’s and Korngold’s Legacy Heading to Cannes

The film Emerging From the Shadows: Discovering the Legacies of Weinberg & Korngold has been chosen a finalist for Best Documentary Film at the annual French Riviera Film Festival, which will take place in Cannes on May 15 and 16.
Directed by Veronika Emily Pohl, the film is featuring the artistry of the world-renowned cellist Kristina Reiko Cooper and the Grammy-nominated Constantine Orbelian, the music director and principal conductor of the New York City Opera. This powerful cinematographic journey is dedicated to two historically overlooked great composers, Mieczysław Weinberg and Erich Wolfgang Korngold.
Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957), born in Brünn, Austria-Hungary, is considered to be one of the founders of Hollywood film music. Mieczysław (Moyshe) Weinberg (1919-1996), born Warsaw, Poland, was one the most prominent Soviet composers whose two cycles of Jewish songs were created entirely to Yiddish lyrics by Yitskhok Leybush Peretz and Samuel Halkin.
Emerging from the Shadows premiered in New York on April 15, 2026. The event drew an esteemed audience of cultural tastemakers, members of the international arts community, prominent media, and New York public figures, underscoring the film’s significance within both cinematic and musical circles.
At the heart of the documentary, produced by Bernhard Fleischer Moving Images GmbH (BFMI), is Kristina Reiko Cooper alongside with Constantine Orbelian performing Weinberg’s and Korngold’s works with the Kaunas City Symphony Orchestra in Lithuania. The director, Veronika Emily Pohl, known for her work with ZDF/Arte, SONY Classical, and Deutsche Grammophon, describes the film as “a journey through artistry, history, and identity – honoring two composers whose voices refused to vanish.”

Veronika Emily Pohl, Constantine Orbelian and Kristina Reiko Cooper.

Watch the official trailer

Yiddishland Pavilion: Third Edition

The New York-based artist Yevgeniy Fiks is happy to announce on our website the third edition of the Yiddishland Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. The opening ceremomy will take place on May 7 from 6 till 8 PM. This year’s edition is titled The Words That Fit My Mouth. The full program is available on the pavilion’s website.

We hope to see you in Venice, or that you’ll follow our activities and help spread the word from afar.

The Yiddishland Pavilion remains a grassroots, independent art project run by just two people: Maria Veits and myself. We would greatly appreciate your support in sustaining this effort for the sake of contemporary Yiddish culture. Please consider supporting us and amplify the voice of the Yiddishland Pavilion:

https://ko-fi.com/yiddishlandpavilion

A dank, thank you, grazie, toda!

Yevgeniy Fiks

Return of Yiddish Glory

Prof. Anna Shternshis and the musician Psoy Korolenko produced a new music album based on songs from Moisey Beregovsky’s archive, Yiddish Glory: The Silenced Songs of World War II. Unlike their previous 2018 Grammy-nominated album, Yiddish Glory: The Lost Songs of WW2, which resurrects anti-fascist songs of Jewish Red Army soldiers and partisans, the new production features songs of Holocaust survivors of the camps and ghettos.

Moisey Beregovsky (1892–1961) was an outstanding figure in Soviet musicology, a scholar who almost single-handedly preserved the treasures of Jewish folk music. The new album includes several performers. Psoy Korolenko, the primary male vocalist, is joined by the UK-based singer Alice Zawadzki, who performs in Yiddish for the first time and plays violin as well. Other singers include the Toronto-based cantor Simon Spiro.

Marc Chagall: The Joy of Earth’s Gravity

The new exhibit Marc Chagall: The Joy of Earth’s Gravity at the Moscow’s Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts features numerous items related to or written in Yiddish. World famous as a painter, Chagall also wrote poetry and articles on literature and art in his mother tongue, Yiddish. He was a close friend of many Yiddish authors whose books he illustrated.

The exhibit, which will remain open till March 15, 2026, is accompanied with quotes from Chagall’s autobiography My Life, and dedicated to the artist’s work in Russia from the late 1900s to 1922. Some of the items from private collections are presented to the public for the first time.

The most prominent feature of the new exhibition is a huge composition of seven enormous murals painted by Chagall for the Jewish Chamber Theater in 1920. Another, more humble and yet very important item is a rare 1917 edition of Der Nister’s fairytales with Chagall’s illustrations. An electronic installation next to it shows magnified pages of this book.

Photo credit: Y. and D. Matveyev

Ester-Rokhl Kaminska’s Memoirs in English

The memoirs of the pioneering Yiddish actress Ester-Rokhl Kaminska (1870–1925), have been for the first time published in English, translated by the actor and theater researcher Mikhl Yashinsky.

The original text of Kaminska’s memoirs appeared as a series of 32 publications in the Warsaw Yiddish newpaper Der Moment under the title “Derner un blumen: der veg fun mayn lebn – memuarn” (Thorns and Flowers: the Path of My Life – Memoirs). As Yashinsky explains in his detailed introduction, Ester-Rokhl Kaminska is known today as the mother of Yiddish theater for a number of reasons: her husband Abraham Isaac Kaminsky was the founder of the first professional Jewish theater in Poland, where her most prominent role was in the play Di Mame (The Mother). She was also the mother of another famous Yiddish actress, Ida Kaminska (1899-1980).

The actress managed to write her intimate self-portrait while suffering from cancer. The memoirs appeared in Der Moment after her death. They also provide a unique glimpse into the everyday life of working Jewish women of the late 19th and early 20th century.

Shtetl on Fontanka

On July 17, 2025, the exhibition “Shtetl on Fontanka. From Chagall to the Present” opened at the KGallery in St. Petersburg. It is dedicated to Jewish artists whose life and work are closely connected to St. Petersburg. Fontanka is one of the city’s rivers. The project’s curator is Dr. Valery Dymshits, a folklorist and scholar of Yiddish literature. The conceptual design of the exhibition was created by the theater artist Valery Polunovsky.

The large three-story exhibition, consisting of seven thematic sections, is permeated with the history and culture of Eastern European Jews. A significant part of the exhibits is directly or indirectly related to Yiddish. For the first time, the works of four generations of Jewish painters, graphic artists and sculptors who worked over the past 150 years in St. Petersburg (historically also known as Petrograd and Leningrad) were brought together. 24 artists are presented in total, from Isaac Asknaziy to Marc Chagall, Nathan Altman, Solomon Yudovin, Anatoly (Tankhum) Kaplan and many other world famous masters.

Visitors who come to the exhibition find themselves in an imaginary Jewish shtetl, as the artists viewed their home city, Leningrad, and get acquainted with the religious traditions of Judaism, Jewish theater, folklore, modern interpretations of Jewish folk art. The presented works allow us to view the city’s Jewish art as a coherent integral cultural phenomenon.

The exhibition is opened until September 14. The editor-in-chief of our website, writer and journalist Yoel Matveyev, attended the press premiere inauguration of the exhibition with the photojournalist Svetlana Smaznova.