Preservation of Yiddish Culture

Preservation of Yiddish Culture and Heritage

Сохранение культуры идиша

אָפּהיטן אונדזער ייִדישע קולטור־ירושה

לשמור על תרבות היידיש

Yiddish New York 2024

Yiddish New York 2024

Yiddish New York 2024

From December 21 to 26, 2024, the 10th annual festival Yiddish New York will be held at the city’s Hebrew Union College. This year’s program will include dozens of events, including concerts featuring the world’s leading Yiddish music artists, lectures by leading scholars of Yiddish history, literature and culture, music lessons, singing and folk dance workshops, Yiddish film screenings, etc. The programs will be presented online as well.

According to its organizers, Yiddish New York is the largest festival of Yiddish music, culture and language in the US. Detailed information and tickets are available online.

Riki Rose’s New Song

Riki Rose’s New Song

Riki Rose’s New Song

Riki Rose, a talented young singer and composer who lives in New York, posted on YouTube a recording of her new Yiddish song “Utem Arein Utem Arois” (“Breathe in, breathe out”), produced and arranged by Shloime Bernstein and mixed by Yanky Cohen. The video clip is accompanied by the song’s lyrics.
Rose was raised in a family of Satmar Hasidim; she is singing in her native Yiddish dialect of Austrian-Hungarian origin. Besides her musical activities, she also writes essays in Yiddish. Her colleagues involved in the this song production grew up in Yiddish-speaking Hasidic communities as well.

Yiddish at Nizhny Novgorod Gala

Yiddish at Nizhny Novgorod Gala

Yiddish at Nizhny Novgorod Gala

On October 24, 2024, a gala concert, which included the Russian opera award ceremony “Casta Diva”, took place at the Opera and Ballet Theater of Nizhny Novgorod. Among other music compositions presented at this prestigious event was the Yiddish song “Yosl and Sore-Dvoshe”, arranged by the composer Leonid Desyatnikov and performed by the international award-winning opera singer Maria Kalinina.

Previously, on June 9, 2024, Kalinina had performed in Nizhny Novgorod Desyatnikov’s entire song cycle Yiddish, of which “Yosl and Sore-Dvoshe” is the 4th part. The cycle is based on early 20th century cabaret repertoire transformed into opera pieces.

The Shvesters Tour New York

The Shvesters Tour New York

The Shvesters Tour New York

The Shvesters, a vocal duo who recently began their music career in Detroit, performed several concerts in New York. On August 22 and 25, 2024, the Museum of Jewish Heritage hosted their performances twice, accompanied by the renowned guitarist Omri Bar Giora. On September 17 the duo had a concert at the Altneu, a relatively new Modern Orthodox synagogue launched in Manhattan’s Upper East Side in 2022.

During the last couple of years, the two singers, Chava Levi and Polina Fradkin, gained their reputation on social media for their perfectly synchronized voices and matching outfits, which resulted in a series of successful concerts in the US and Israel. Levi and Fradkin transform classic Yiddish melodies into sophisticated, contemporary harmonic jazz arrangements. As noted by one of their critics, Tel Aviv-based journalist Blake Flayton, “The Shvesters do not just make us want to move our feet to Yiddish; their music makes us long for Yiddish”.

Sholom Secunda’s Anniversary in New York

Sholom Secunda’s Anniversary in New York

Sholom Secunda’s Anniversary in New York

On September 14, 2024, the Merkin Hall of the Kaufman Music Center in New York hosted the concert Sholom Secunda: A 130th Anniversary Spectacular, staring the Swedish singer Idun Carling, the ex-Soviet singer-songwriter Alexander Gorodnitsky, the jazz band of the Grammy-nominated saxophonist Yaacov Mayman, and other prominent musicians.

Sholom Secunda (1894 – 1974) was an American composer of Ukrainian-Jewish descent, known for some of the most popular Yiddish songs, including “Bay mir bistu sheyn“. Although he emigrated from Russia in 1907, his tunes remain well known in post-Soviet countries as well as in the US, where he is considered one of the greatest 20th century composers of New York’s historical Yiddish Theater District.

Linguist’s Review of Beregovsky’s Index

Linguist’s Review of Beregovsky’s Index

Linguist’s Review of Beregovsky’s Index

Opera Musicologica, the academic journal of the St. Petersburg Conservatory, has published a review of the book Moisei Beregovsky: Biobiographical Index produced under the auspices of our project. Beregovsky (1892 – 1961) was a great Soviet Jewish folklorist often considered the foremost ethnomusicologist of Eastern European Jewry.
The reviewer, Dr. Larissa Naidich, is a professor of linguistics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The book’s compiler, Dr. Evgenia Khazdan, is a well known musicologist based in St. Petersburg.
The review’s author notes that the book contains convenient indexes, and that its significance goes far beyond the biobiographical material on the life and work of one individual musicologist. Naidich writes: “One can say with confidence that today no researcher of the Ashkenazi Jewish musical tradition will pass by this Index compiled by Evgenia Khazdan.”
Dr. Naidich emphasizes that the book can also be useful for linguists studying the Yiddish language. We are happy to remind our readers that the electronic version of the bilingual (Russian and English) book on Moisei Beregovsky is publicly available on our web portal and, thanks to the availability of the entire text in English, is accessible to a wide readership in different countries.