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.

Sholem Aleichem Monument: 2 Years

Sholem Aleichem Monument: 2 Years

Sholem Aleichem Monument: 2 Years

On June 6, 2023, two years ago, a statue of the great Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem was erected at Tel Aviv University. We are happy to inform our readers about this anniversary.
The creation of this monument by the renowned Soviet and Russian sculptor Yuri Chernov (1935 – 2009) and its installation at Tel Aviv University’s campus had been initiated by our website’s founder, Dr. Mark Zilberquit. The sculptor’s grandson, philanthropist and businessman Alexander Chernov, played an important role in this project.

The installation of Sholem Aleichem’s statue signaled the beginning of new studies of Yiddish language and culture under the guidance of Tel Aviv University’s professors who also organize, besides regular classes, annual festivals celebrating their students’ academic achievements. These ongoing scholarly and cultural activities were made possible in 2023 thanks to two charitable foundations, The Heritage Projects Foundation (USA) and Yiddish Heritage Preservation Foundation (Israel). The studies are supported by Mark and Julia Zilberquit Scholarship.

Peter Thoren, Amos Elad, Julia Zilberquit, Mark Zilberquit, Ariel Porad, Leonard Blavatnik, Avi Fisher.

 Pictures: Yuval Yosef

Previously Unknown Beregovsky Book Published

Previously Unknown Beregovsky Book Published

Previously Unknown Beregovsky Book Published

Dr. Mark Zilberquit holding the new Beregovsky book

Muzyka, one of the largest, oldest and most authoritative publishing houses in the world specializing in classical music, has published in Moscow a new academic bilingual Russian-Yiddish book – Moisey Beregovsky: Essays on the History of Yiddish Folk Music.

The book is based on a manuscript by the famous musicologist and folklorist Moisey Beregovsky previously unknown even in academic circles and discovered by Muzyka’s director, Dr. Mark Zilberquit, the founder of our website and of the Yiddish-promoting Heritage Projects Foundation. Its full text is included and edited according to modern literary Yiddish by Yelena Sarashevskaya, the editor-in-chief of the newspaper Birobidzhaner Shtern, and Yoel Matveyev, the editor-in-chief of our web portal.

This publication is a major result of our project’s activities. The publication of this book was supported by Academician Grigory Roytberg, a renowned philanthropist, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Russian Jewish Congress.

As an integral part of this volume, high quality scans of Moisey Beregovsky’s original manuscript are presented in our online library. We are also publicly presenting an electronic version of the book free of charge for strictly personal use.

The commented translation of the manuscript by Evgenia Khazdan and Yoel Matveyev is supplied with Evgenia Khazdan’s and Galina Kopytova’s detailed musicological and historical analysis. Khazdan is a renowned musicologist based in St. Petersburg. Galina Kopytova is a major researcher at the Russian Institute of Art History, where the presented Beregovsky manuscript had been discovered.

The book introduces the reader to the world of Yiddish folk music starting from the middle ages, and provides a new glimpse into Soviet Yiddish research. Moisey Beregovsky, who remains the foremost figure in Yiddish folk music studies, had to face unique difficulties in the troubling times of the post-WWII Stalin’s USSR.

We remind our readers that our website contains a rich repository of other unique materials related to Beregovsky, including Evgenia Khazdan’s Biobibliographic Index, also published by Muzyka in 2023 as another important result of our project’s activities.