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
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!
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.
The Moscow publishing house Kuchkovo Polye released a new Russian book titled The Soviet Tzaddik. Stories about the Ribnitzer Rebbe: from the Dniester to the Hudson River, edited by Dr. Valery Dymshits, Dr. Maria Kaspina and Dr. Alexandra Poljan. Rather than focusing on the Ribnitzer Rebbe as a historical personality, the monograph explores the rich folkloric material surrounding this figure, largely collected from contemporary Hasidic materials written in Yiddish. It is the first major academic study of this subject.
Chaim Zanvl Abramowitz (1902 ? – 1995), known as the Ribnitzer Rebbe, is considered one of the greatest 20th century Hasidic leaders, reputed as a miracle worker who maintained an extraordinary ascetic lifestyle. He managed to live a fully Jewish religious life in the USSR; soon after his emigration to Israel in 1970 and a few years later to the United States he became a living legend among Yiddish-speaking American Hasidim. The Ribnitzer Rebbe’s legacy remains a rich source of contemporary Yiddish folklore.
From July 12 to July 18, 2024, a special educational program dedicated to today’s Hasidic Yiddish was held at the campus of the University of Vienna. A similar course will be offered from July 23 to August 4 during the Yiddish Summer festival in Weimar, Germany. Its organizers explain that although academic programs typically only teach standard literary Yiddish, this year they decided to do something new: to focus on the Hasidic variants of Yiddish spoken as a daily language by around one million people across the world.
The teaching team includes both native speakers of Hasidic Yiddish and expert researchers who are members of the innovative Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish group at UCL (University College London). Both the Vienna and Weimar programs cover such diverse subjects as modern Hasidic fiction, traditional and pop music, dances, film, and more.
The editors of our site are pleased to announce the opening of a new large section: The archive of the legendary Soviet Yiddish magazine Sovetish Heymland. It is still work in progress; at the moment, the available issues cover the period from 1961 to 1965. On our website you can also read about the history of this wonderful periodical. The publication of the magazine’s full archive on the Internet is planned to be completed in the second half of 2024.
The Sovetish Heymland digitization is carried out by the Heritage Project Foundation (USA) and the Yiddish Culture Preservation Foundation (Israel) on the initiative of their founder, Dr. Mark Zilberquit. The project’s partner is the publishing house Knizhniki (Russia). Financial assistance is provided by Academician Grigory Roitberg, the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Russian Jewish Congress.
