3rd Yiddish Festival in Birobidzhan

From December 4 to 7, 2023, the 3rd annual Yiddish Festival was held in Birobidzhan. More than 80 events — concerts, workshops, talks with language experts, etc. — were held in the city and several other localities of the region.The program was concluded by the lighting of the first Hanukkah candle and a festive concert. Yoel Matveyev, a Yiddish writer from St. Petersburg, participated in the festival as an honored guest, giving lectures on the spiritual and historical significance of the Jewish Autonomous Region. The festival was attended by Boruch Gorin, director of the Moscow publishing house Knizhniki, who told the Birobidzhan residents about the role of Yiddish in his life and family.

Elena Sarashevskaya, the editor-in-chief of the newspaper Birobidzhaner Stern, interviews Yoel Matveyev at the Yiddish Festival. The conversation was held at the publishing house Birobidzhan.

Site News: Collection of Isa Kremer’s Songs

Our site’s editors are pleased to announce a significant addition to our collection of Yiddish music: about 20 songs by the famous singer Isa Kremer. Each song is accompanied by a video clip with historical photographs of her. We would also like to remind our readers about other extensive song collections on our website: songs by Sidi Tal and Nechama Lifshitz.

News from SEFER

From December 6 to 8, 2023, the international conference “The Concept of Borders in Slavic and Jewish Cultural Tradition” will be held in Moscow, organized by the SEFER Center of Academic and Humanitarian Jewish Studies, the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Center for Slavic and Jewish Studies.
The evening session on December 7, led by Dr. Valery Dymshits and Dr. Ekaterina Norkina, will cover a number of topics related to the Yiddish language. In particular, the Moscow researcher Galina Eliasberg will talk about cultural boundaries in Sholom Aleichem’s novel “Wandering Stars.”
The SEFER Center was created in 1994 with the goal of promoting scientific research in the field of Jewish studies and teaching Jewish disciplines in Russia and in all post-Soviet countries. The organization conducts language webinars, which include a group for learning Yiddish from level zero, and is currently looking for new students. The group is led by the well known specialist Dr. Ekaterina Karaseva.
SEFER has also informed us about a planned winter school for students and young researchers dedicated to the topic of Yiddish and the Holocaust. The program is still under discussion. The plan includes lectures, seminars, workshops and a cultural program. News about the development of this project will be published on our website.

Yiddish Concert in Nizhny Novgorod

On November 23, 2023, the Opera and Ballet Theater of Nizhny Novgorod, one of the largest and prominent cities in Russia, held a Jewish-themed concert called Menorah Music. Three opera soloists, Yulia Sitnikova, Anastasia Jilas and Svetlana Polzikova, performed a number of Yiddish songs composed by Alexander Krein, Moses (Mieczysław) Weinberg and Yoel Engel.

The lyrics’ authors included famous Yiddish poets, such as Izi Kharik, Aaron Kushnirov and Yitskhok Leybush Peretz. The song “Close your little eyes” (“Makh tsu di eygelekh”) performed by Anastasia Jilas was sung as an encore. Its tragically murdered authors, the poet Isaiah Spiegel and the composer David Beigelman, wrote it in the Lodz ghetto after the children imprisoned there were deported to a death camp.

To demonstrate to the audience the global significance of Jewish culture in general and Yiddish culture in particular, the concert program deliberately included works by non-Jewish composers written on Jewish themes: Robert Schumann, Sergei Prokofiev and Maurice Ravel.

From Irish into Yiddish

On the Celtic festival Samhain, November 1, 2023, the Russian-Yiddish newspaper Birobidzhaner Shtern published a selection of poems translated from the Irish language (Gaelic) into Yiddish by the poet and writer Yoel Matveyev who currently lives in St. Petersburg.

The publication includes several works by 17th-21st century poets, as well as an ancient anonymous poem, presumably dating back to the 9th century, about a cat named Pangur. The translations are accompanied by an introductory article in Yiddish and Russian. As far as we know, this is the first literary experiment in history that directly connects Yiddish and Irish.

New Yiddish Exhibition in Amherst

On October 15, 2023, the new permanent exhibition “Yiddish: A Global Culture” opened at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst. The main goal of the exhibit is to show the global significance of Yiddish culture in its various aspects, including literature, theater, music, press and even politics. Many prominent political figures, predominantly left-wing, wrote works in Yiddish.

Highlights among the hundreds of exhibited objects include a 60-foot color mural of “global Yiddishland” by the illustrator Martin Haake, a micrographic portrait of the Yiddishist revolutionary Chaim Zhitlowsky, composed of miniature letters from his texts by the Buenos Aires textile worker Guedale Tenenbaum, and a reconstruction of Yitskhok-Leybush Peretz’s apartment in Warsaw, which at the beginning of the 20th century hosted a famous literary salon of Yiddish writers.

The exhibition’s opening was celebrated by performances of several artists, including the actress, playwright and translator Caraid O’Brien who performed a Yiddish monologue of Justyna, a young Polish Jewish woman, from Sholem Asch’s play On the Road to Zion (original title: Moshiyekh’s Tsaytn, The Messiah’s Times). Written in 1905, Ash’s play had been immediately translated into Russian and won great success in St. Petersburg, staged by the famous actress Vera Komissarzhevskaya.

O’Brien, who translated Asсh’s play into English, grew up in Ireland. Her family spoke Irish and was fond of old Irish legends. In her youth she fell in love with the Yiddish language and literature. In May 2023, O’Brien published her trilogy of translated Asch’s plays God of Vengeance, Motke Thief, and The Dead Man, and premiered her radio show of On the Road to Zion. O’Brien’s biography is an excellent example of the new exhibition’s theme: the global importance of Yiddish culture, which attracts enthusiasts from all over the world.

Photo: Official Facebook page of the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst