Preservation of Yiddish Culture

Preservation of Yiddish Culture and Heritage

Сохранение культуры идиша

אָפּהיטן אונדזער ייִדישע קולטור־ירושה

לשמור על תרבות היידיש

New Yiddish Animation from St. Petersburg

New Yiddish Animation from St. Petersburg

New Yiddish Animation from St. Petersburg

The Jewish Community Center of St. Petersburg, Russia, produced a children’s animation in Yiddish titled An Emeser Kontsert (A True Concert), directed by Marina Sokol. Children who study the language at the local Yiddish-oriented Sunday club Undzere Traditsyes (Our Traditions) recite a poem by Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman (1920-2013).

Born in Vienna and raised in Czernowitz (then Romania, now Ukraine), Schaechter-Gottesman grew up in a Yiddish-speaking family surrounded by a multilingual environment. Luckily, she survived the war in the Czernowitz ghetto, along with her mother, husband and several other family members. Later on, after moving to New York, she authored eight books of Yiddish poetry. Several of her relatives continue to play important roles in today’s Yiddish culture.

5th Yiddish Festival in Birobidzhan

5th Yiddish Festival in Birobidzhan

5th Yiddish Festival in Birobidzhan

The 5th Yiddish Festival (Yiddishfest) took place in Birobidzhan from March 1 to March 3, 2026. Yoel Matveyev from Saint Petersburg, the editor-in-chief of our website, along with Olga Matvienko, an associate professor of the Donetsk State University, visited the capital of the Jewish Autonomous Region and gave lectures about their work. Matvienko specializes in poetry translation and translates Yiddish poetry into Russian and Ukrainian.

The festival’s conclusion coincided with a Purim party organized by the local Jewish community. It included concerts where professional musicians and Birobidzhan’s children choir Ilanot performed songs in Yiddish. There were also presentations of books produced in Birobidzhan that contain original materials in Yiddish and translations from Yiddish into Russian. The festival included a wide array of other events as well.

Especially powerful and emotional was the festival’s opening on March 1, which included a theatrical presentation of the unique bilingual Yiddish-Russian poetry book “Продолжит петь его строка” (His Poem’s Line Will Continue to Sing). It contains poems of 23 Yiddish poets who died as Red Army soldiers fighting the Nazis during WWII translated by the Birobidzhan-based poet Alla Akimenko. Published in Birobidzhan in 2025, the book is dedicated to the 80th anniversary of the WWII victory.

New Performance of The Dybbuk at Tel Aviv University

New Performance of The Dybbuk at Tel Aviv University

New Performance of The Dybbuk at Tel Aviv University

The Tel Aviv University Theatre performed the famous S. An-sky’s play The Dybbuk from January 7 to January 14, 2026. The perfomance, played in Hebrew, has been translated from the original Yiddish by Dr. Ruthie Abeliovich, an associate of our project, Dr. Oren Cohen Roman and Dr. Miriam Trinh.

Shloyme Zanvl Rappoport (1863 – 1920), known by his pen name S. An-sky, was a Jewish author, playwright, researcher of Jewish folklore, polemicist, and cultural and political activist. He is best known for his play The Dybbuk or Between Two Worlds, written in 1914. In 1912-1914, he led the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition, which visited approximately 60–70 shtetls to the Pale of Settlement. The expedition collected thousands of invaluable artifacts and made over 500 recordings of Jewish folk music using a phonograph.

The Dybbuk was first staged in Warsaw by Joseph Lateiner (1853–1935) on 1920, one month after An-sky’s death. Since then it has been translated into over a dozen languages and performed thousands of times all over the world. It remains a Hasidic Gothic Yiddish story turned also into a film by Michał Waszyński in 1937.

A Poetic Dialogue of Translators

A Poetic Dialogue of Translators

A Poetic Dialogue of Translators

As last year, the Yiddish section of the 7th International Winter School of Translation at St. Petersburg State University was held by Yoel Matveyev, Lyubov Lavrova, and Olga Matvienko. This time, the lecturers engaged in a poetic dialogue about two Jewish poets who lived in Birobidzhan.

Matveyev spoke about his work on his Yiddish translations of Rilke. Lavrova talked about her participation in the Yiddish authors’ database on the website of the Congress of Jewish Culture (CJC), an international Yiddish organization founded in 1948. The database is available in both Yiddish and English. Olga Matvienko spoke about her recent translations of poems about Birobidzhan and the Jewish Autonomous Region, which she translated into Russian.

Works by Henekh Koyfman and Aaron Kushnirov that she liked were previously translated by Yoel Matveyev. Both versions have now been published by the newspaper Birobidzhaner Shtern.

Free Online Yiddish Classes in Russian

Free Online Yiddish Classes in Russian

Yiddish Poetry Evening in St. Petersburg

The art exhibition Shtetl on Fontanka. From Chagall to the Present in St. Petersburg, covered by our website’s news section in July, was concluded by a poetry evening. Several poets and poetry translators recited their Russian translations of Abraham Sutzkever, Moyshe Kulbak, Leib Kvitko, Aaron Glanz-Leyeles and other famous Yiddish poets. We offer our readers a video recording of one part of the event, in which Yoel Matveyev, the editor-in-chief of this site, himself a poet and translator, recited his poetry translations from Yiddish.

Celebrating the Giant Yiddish Dictionary in Amsterdam

Celebrating the Giant Yiddish Dictionary in Amsterdam

Celebrating the Giant Yiddish Dictionary in Amsterdam

A festive evening was held in Amsterdam on September 17, 2025, in honor of Justus van de Kamp, the compiler of the giant Yiddish-Dutch comprehensive dictionary, on which he has been enthusiastically and voluntarily working for over 35 years. The result of his work is the free online dictionary, containing over 100,000 entries and over 24,000 sample phrases. Besides the speeches of several Yiddish specialists, the festive gathering was accompanied with a rich musical program by the singer Shura Lipovsky.