Preservation of Yiddish Culture

Preservation of Yiddish Culture and Heritage

Сохранение культуры идиша

אָפּהיטן אונדזער ייִדישע קולטור־ירושה

לשמור על תרבות היידיש

Sholem Aleichem’s Yahrzeit in St. Petersburg

Sholem Aleichem’s Yahrzeit in St. Petersburg

Sholem Aleichem’s Yahrzeit in St. Petersburg

On April 26, 2026, the Jewish Community Center of St. Petersburg held an event dedicated to the 110th death anniversary of the Yiddish classic writer Sholem Aleichem. The program included recitations of Sholem Aleichem’s poetry and prose in the original and in Russian translations, listening to the famous writer’s recorded voice, and talks about his lasting legacy in connection to the city.

From 1912 to 1914, S. An-ski (Shloyme Zaynvl Rapoport) headed Jewish ethnographic expeditions to the Pale of Jewish Settlement. A brief display of the expeditionary collection (about 800 items) opened in the former capital of Russia on April 19, 1914. The sound record played at the anniversary event was Sholem Aleichem’s short speech during his visit to this exhibition soon after its opening, presumably on May 14, 1914.

St. Petersburg is also the place where Sholem Aleichem had started his Yiddish writer’s career in 1883 by publishing his short story Tsvey shteyner (Two Stones) in Aleksander Zederbaum’s weekly Dos yudishes folks-blat. The original issues of the newspaper were presented at the event.

New Electronic Books from Birobidzhan

New Electronic Books from Birobidzhan

New Electronic Books from Birobidzhan

The 20th volume of the bilingual Yiddish-Russian almanac Birobidzhan is now available free of charge in an electronic form on the website dedicated to the historical and cultural legacy of Russia’s Jewish Autonomous Region. Another valuable electronic book free to download on the same site is Yoel Matveyev’s Russian translation of an entire issue of the magazine Sovetish Heymland of April 1974, dedicated to the 40-year anniversary of the Jewish Autonomous Region established on May 7, 1934.

A limited paper edition of the translation has recently been presented at the 5th annual Yiddish Festival in Birobidzhan. Russian readers will now be able, for the first time in history, to familiarize themselves with the legendary Soviet Yiddish monthly. The translation includes the original illustrations and is rendered in a style resembling the historical Yiddish edition.

Rokhl Feygenberg’s Childhood Memoirs in English

Rokhl Feygenberg’s Childhood Memoirs in English

Rokhl Feygenberg’s Childhood Memoirs in English

Rokhl Feygenberg’s Yiddish memoirs of her childhood years in the small Belarusian shtetl Lyuban, were published by Syracuse University Press, translated into English by Tamara T. Helfer.

Rokhl Feygenberg (1885–1972) became one of the youngest Yiddish authors when her autobiographical novel was released as a series in the literary magazine Dos lebn in 1905. In 1909 it was published as a book. Her romanticized childhood memoirs take place in the fictional village of Bulin, surrounded by wild swamps and forests, a typical scenery for Belarusian Jews in the late 19the century.

Helfer titled her masterful translation The Winding Road. Feygenberg’s original title was simply Di kinder-yorn (The Childhood). The book presents vivid descriptions of everyday shtetl life. Years laters after her debut childhood-based novel, Rokhl Feygenberg became one of the first few women who established themselves as professional Yiddish writers and journalists.

Katerina Kuznetsova’s First Poetry Book

Katerina Kuznetsova’s First Poetry Book

Katerina Kuznetsova’s First Poetry Book

The poet Katerina Kuznetsova presented her first Yiddish poetry book Glozperl (Glass Beads) on February 24, 2026, in Berlin. The book was published by the Swedish publishing house Olniansky Tekst.

Born in 1989 in Moscow, Kuznetsova started learning Yiddish at the age of 20. She has been living in the capital of Germany since 2016 where she teaches Yiddish. She founded the informal Yiddishist cultural group Yiddish.Berlin, which includes several local poets.

Kuznetsova began writing Yiddish poetry in 2018. Some of her poems have been translated into Russian, Ukrainian and English. A selection of 10 Kuznetsova’s poems were included in the bilingual volume of contemporary Yiddish poetry with Russian translations Ikh ker zikh um (I Return), published in 2025 in Moscow.

Photo by Jason Lipscombe

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.

Rilke and Mandelstam in Yiddish

Rilke and Mandelstam in Yiddish

Rilke and Mandelstam in Yiddish

The Jewish Community Center of St. Petersburg held a literary event led by Yoel Matveyev, our website’s editor-in-chief, who presented a selection of Rainer Maria Rilke’s and Osip Mandelstam’s poems translated into Yiddish. Soon after the event, Matveyev’s translations were published in the newspaper Birobidzhaner Shtern.

Mandelstam’s poetry had been translated into Yiddish by several poets, including Aron Vergelis, the editor-in-chief of the Soviet literature and art magazine Sovetish Heymland. To the best of our knowledge, Matveyev was the first to translate Rilke into Yiddish. Despite the apparent similarity, Yiddish is quite different from German on every level. As the translator explains in his Birobidzhaner Shtern essay, he had to rewrite every one of Rilke’s lines from scratch, and not just to “touch up” the German language, as some people would mistakenly think.

Regarding Sovetish Heymland and its legacy, we are happy to inform our readers that we already have digitized most of its issues from 1961 to 1991 and published all of the them on our website. Soon we hope to present all issues of this highly influential historical magazine, which often contained poetry translations from Russian and other languages into Yiddish.