Naomi Prawer Kadar International Yiddish Summer Program

Naomi Prawer Kadar

Dr. Naomi Prawer Kadar (1949-2010) was an inspiring educator and scholar. As a daughter of Holocaust survivors, she understood the importance of Yiddish culture from a very early age and succeeded to transmit her love for the beauty of Yiddish language and culture to many of her students.

She devoted herself to creating new education programs in Israel and in the USA, developing curricula, training teachers and ensuring that her beloved Yiddish language would be cherished by future generations. Despite her extensive professional obligations, she always found time to teach and to build relationships with students. She held teaching positions in academic institutions such as Columbia University and the Jewish Theological Seminary. During the summers, she taught Yiddish at various summer programs across the world. Naomi’s spirit and contributions continue to make a profound impact on the lives of thousands of students around the world through the initiatives of the Naomi Foundation.

The Naomi Prawer Kadar International Yiddish Summer program offers intensive Yiddish instruction at four levels in person, as well as an intermediate Yiddish program for online students. Its faculty, directed by Prof. Hana Wirth-Nesher (Tel Aviv University) and ​Prof. Avraham Novershtern (Hebrew University), includes Eliezer Niborski and Dr. Miriam Trinh.

Eliezer Niborski

Niborski, born in Buenos Aires, grew up in a Yiddish-speaking family in Paris. For many years, he has been regularly participating as a Yiddish teacher in intensive educational programs in Tel Aviv, New York, Vilnius and Berlin.

Miriam Trinh

Trinh, born in Poland, has taught Yiddish language and literature at different levels in Paris, Vilnius, Strasbourg, Oxford, New York and in Tel Aviv. She currently teaches Yiddish at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Yiddish Culture: Practical Engagement

Starting from the academic year 2023-2024, the Tel Aviv University will be embarking on an exciting endeavor that will immerse its students in a collaborative interdisciplinary research of the world of Yiddish culture and heritage, through a combination of theoretical, archival and practical artistic investigation. It will explore the theatrical, musical and literary facets of the contemporary Yiddish culture.

The project will include performance-based and academic research of various aspects of Yiddish culture, its past and current innovations and dynamics. The students will be encouraged to engage creatively and scholarly with the unique archival materials that that are collected by the Heritage Projects Foundation (USA) and the Yiddish Heritage Preservation Foundation (Israel). The materials are already or will be made publicly available on this website (Yiddish-Culture.com).

Interdisciplinary at its core, the project will engage students from various academic and artistic fields around shared annual themes related to Yiddish culture. The first 2024 theme will be called Global Sholem Aleichem.

Letter of appreciation by the American Friends of Tel Aviv University

This project is supported by the Roza Lubin Scholarship for collaborative interdisciplinary research in Yiddish Culture and Heritage Preservation, established by Dr. Mark Zilberquit, the founder of the two aforementioned foundations and of this website. The scholarship will be dedicated to interdisciplinary, archival, historical and practice-based research on various aspects of Yiddish culture, including theater, music, film and visual arts.

Each year, the scholarship program will fund a research group of graduate students devoted to Yiddish culture. Each year, the group’s work will be dedicated to one major cultural topic or figure. Examples may include the the global impacts of Sholem Aleichem’s works, Shakespeare’s plays translated into Yiddish, etc. The aim of the research group is twofold: to shed new light on the history of Yiddish culture and its global impact, and to examine how its legacy is still relevant and vibrant in contemporary culture.

The group will be comprised of up to 10 graduate students (MA/MFA/PhD) and two faculty members who will explore together Yiddish artistic works and archival materials, combining historical research with creative practices. Each year, the group’s work will culminate in a performance, an exhibition, or a conference at which the findings of the group will be presented.

2024 Theme: Global Sholem Aleichem

Ruthie Abeliovich

Sholem Aleichem (1859-1916) is among the most celebrated modern Yiddish writers. His works have been performed on the stage across the world in a variety of languages. The researchers engaged in the new program will study the ways by which his plays address issues typical to modern Jewish experience, while also resonating with contemporary cultural, social and political issues across continents and languages, aimed at individual aspects of present-day audiences.

Yair Lipshitz

The project will be coordinated by Dr. Ruthie Abeliovich and Dr. Yair Lipshitz. Abeliovich is a senior lecturer of Theatre and Performance Studies at the Tel Aviv University, the author of Possessed Voices: Aural Remains from Modernist Hebrew Theatre. Lipshitz is a senior lecturer at the Department of Theatre Arts, the head of Tel Aviv University’s Cymbalista Jewish Heritage Center. He is the author of several books on theater and Judaism. His main fields of research are Jewish theater and the intersections between stage performance and Jewish religious traditions.

Goldrich Family Institute

Jona Goldrich

The Goldrich Family Institute for Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture was established in 2005 by the Goldrich family in honor of Jona Goldrich (1927-2016) – a Holocaust survivor who escaped Poland in 1942 and eventually became one of California’s most successful real estate developers and a prominent philanthropist. His contributions and initiatives helped to preserve the memory of the Jewish and Yiddish civilization both in the US and in Israel.

Hana Wirth-Nesher

The founding director of the Institute is Professor Hana Wirth-Nesher of the Department of English and American Studies. She led the Institute until the fall of 2020. The current director is Dr. Hannah Pollin-Galay, a senior lecturer in the Literature Department known as a researcher and teacher of Yiddish literature and Holocaust Studies.

The Goldrich Family Institute administers the Inter-university MA Program in Yiddish Studies for the Tel Aviv Campus, the Anna and Max Webb Chair for Visiting Scholars in Yiddish, as well as the Goldrich Family Foundation Advanced Yiddish Studies Forum, which allows the students to contact with leading scholars in the field.

The Institute is also the center for the world-renowned Naomi Prawer Kadar International Yiddish Summer Program.