Boris Sandler Celebrates His 75th Anniversary

Boris Sandler Celebrates His 75th Anniversary

Boris Sandler Celebrates His 75th Anniversary

On May 22, 2025, New York’s Florence Gould Theater presented a concert dedicated to the 75th birthday of the award-winning Yiddish writer Boris Sandler, and to the 45-year anniversary of his writing career. The festive evening titled “Mit Yidish Ibern Lebn: A Lifetime of Yiddish” featured performances by the world renowned pianist Evgeny Kissin with two soprano singers, Susanna Phillips and Ekaterina Kapchits, in the world premiere of the vocal cycle for children “Shterndlekh mit mandlen” (Stars with Almonds). Other participants included the violin virtuoso Efim Zubritsky with Zisl Slepovitch’s Klezmer Trio, the actors Yelena Shmulenson with Allen Lewis Rickman, and others. The evening of songs, poetry and dramatic readings was hosted by the actor and playwright Shane Baker, the executive director of the Congress for Jewish Culture and one of the most prominent Yiddish activists in New York.

The founder of our project, Dr. Mark Zilberquit, also attended the concert. The anniversary’s star, Boris Sandler, wishes the best of luck in our activities of promoting Yiddish culture.

Sandler, who authored about two dozens of poetry and prose books, is himself no stranger to music. Born in 1950 in the Moldovan city of Bălți (known in Yiddish as Belts), he studied music at a conservatory and worked for a decade as a professional violinist. In 1981 he became one of the first Yiddish writers and poets to study Yiddish literature on a professional level at the Higher Literary Courses of the Gorky Institute in Moscow. Since 1998 he served as the head the Forverts, the world’s oldest Yiddish newspaper based in New York. Since 2017, Sandler, who remains one of today’s most prolific Yiddish writers, has been running the online literary magazine Yiddish Branzhe.

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.

Moisey Beregovsky: Essays On The History Of Yiddish Folk Music

Moisey Beregovsky: Essays On The History Of Yiddish Folk Music

Moisey Beregovsky:

Essays on the History of Yiddish Folk Music

Moisey Beregovsky: Essays on the History of Yiddish Folk Music, composed by Evgenia Khazdan, translated and studied by Evgenia Khazdan, Yoel Matveyev, Elena Sarashevskaya, Galina Kopytova. Muzyka Publishers, Moscow, 2025

© Copyright of the authors, publishers and the Heritage Projects Foundation

Genius from a Shtetl

Genius from a Shtetl

Genius from a Shtetl

Grigori Ilugdin’s Russian-Yiddish film Genius from a Shtetl, a documentary about the famous sculptor Mark Antokolsky, is now publicly available online with English subtitles. It contains several 3D-animated scenes in Antokolsky’s native Lithuanian dialect of Yiddish. The director expresses his deep gratitude to the Heritage Projects Foundation (USA) and Yiddish Heritage Preservation Foundation (Israel) who supported the documentary.

Ilugdin wishes all the best to our website and other projects supported by the same two foundations. The film successfully premiered on TV. The Yiddish-oriented Birobidzhan-based channel Bira TV recently broadcast a talk (in Russian) with our website’s editor-in-chief Yoel Matveyev who translated the documentary’s dialogs into Yiddish and organized their audio recordings.

We are also planning to start very soon a new section on our website dedicated to Yiddish and Yiddish-related films. Stay tuned with our news!

Genius from s Shtetl

Documentary about the famous Russian-Jewish sculptor Mark Antokolsky (1843-1902)

Producer: Mark Zilberquit
Director: Grigory Ilugdin

© Grigfilm Production 2024

Supported by the Heritage Projects Foundation (USA) and Yiddish Heritage Preservation Foundation (Israel)

Almanac Birobidzhan 2024

Almanac Birobidzhan 2024

Almanac Birobidzhan 2024

On September 13, 2024, the official Russian TV channel Bira presented a new episode of its Yiddish-oriented weekly program Yiddishkeit dedicated to the recently published 19th issue of the annual almanac Birobidzhan — a book-sized 260-page journal largely devoted to the 90th anniversary of the Jewish Autonomous Region of Russia, established by the Soviet government in 1934.

The almanac includes a large Yiddish section, featuring historical poetry of Birobidzhan authors and a science fiction story by Yoel Matveyev, a St. Petersburg-based contemporary Yiddish writer. The Russian part contains an anthology of poems about tayga translated from Yiddish. Besides unique and diverse historical materials written in both languages, this year’s issue of the almanac also contains two separate art sections.