Preservation of Yiddish Culture

Preservation of Yiddish Culture and Heritage

Сохранение культуры идиша

אָפּהיטן אונדזער ייִדישע קולטור־ירושה

לשמור על תרבות היידיש

YIVO Celebrates Its 100th Anniversary

YIVO Celebrates Its 100th Anniversary

YIVO Celebrates Its 100th Anniversary

On March 24, 2025, YIVO marked its 100th anniversary. On this day in 1925, the Institute for Jewish Research (Yidisher visnshaftlekher institut, known by its abbreviation as YIVO) was established in Vilna (then Poland, now Vilnius, Lithuania). It quickly became one of the most preeminent authorities on Yiddish scholarship and culture in all its aspects. The Institute also played a crucial role in establishing the literary standard of the Yiddish language.

Max Weinreich

Based now in New York, YIVO is hosting a series of public programs celebrating the centenary, covering various academic topics, klezmer music, its own rich history, and more. To contribute to this commemoration, the Forverts published the audio recording of Max Weinreich’s speech at the YIVO 40th Anniversary Lunch (March 24, 1965). Dr. Max Weinreich (1894 – 1969) was a prominent linguist, specializing in sociolinguistics and Yiddish, the language in which he wrote most of his prolific academic works, including the monumental 4-volume History of the Yiddish Language.

 

Seminar on Upcoming Beregovsky Book

Seminar on Upcoming Beregovsky Book

Seminar on Upcoming Beregovsky Book

The upcoming new bilingual Russian-Yiddish academic book Moisey Beregovsky: Essays on the History of Yiddish Folk Music, has been presented on March 25th, 2025, during the interdisciplinary seminar Music in Culture organized by the Russian State Institute of Art Studies. It is scheduled to be printed in mid-April.

The book is based on a previously unknown Beregovsky’s manuscript, included and edited according to modern literary Yiddish, translated and commented, and supplied with detailed musicological and historical analysis.

The discoverer of the manuscript, initiator and organizer of this book’s publishing is Dr. Mark Zilberquit, the director of the Muzyka Publishing House and the founder of our website, which already contains a rich repository of unique materials related to Beregovsky, including Evgenia Khazdan’s Biobibliographic Index.

Follow our news for further details and updates on the book!

Yiddish Golem in Paris

Yiddish Golem in Paris

Yiddish Golem in Paris

On March 4, 2025, the Parisian Théâtre national de la Colline premiered a new staged version of Isaac Bashevis’ short story The Golem. Over one third of the play, written and directed by Amos Gitaï and performed by a small troupe of seven actors, is in Yiddish with French and English subtitles. The performance is accompanied by both instrumental music and modern arrangements of traditional Yiddish songs sung by professional opera singers.

Amos Gitaï is a well known Israeli filmmaker, playwright and artist who lives part-time in Paris. He grew up in a Yiddish-speaking family. None of the actors had any knowledge of the language; they all studied Yiddish specifically for this performance under the guidance of the Paris-based Yiddishist Shahar Feinberg, himself an actor and the director of the Parisian Yiddish theater Troïm-Teater.

Manger’s Book of Paradise in New St. Petersburg Theater

Manger’s Book of Paradise in New St. Petersburg Theater

Manger’s Book of Paradise in New St. Petersburg Theater

A new Russian-language Jewish theater was founded in February 2025 in Saint Petersburg. Directed by Leonid Kolton under the umbrella of the charity organization Chesed Abraham and located at the Jewish cultural center Yesod, this new stage was named the Raznochinnaya Theater (named after the street where it is located, as typical for many other Russian theaters). On February 25 it performed The Book of Paradise premiered over a year ago by the collective Post-Traumatic Theater. The musical play is based on Itzik Manger’s Yiddish classic.

Sonia Dymshits

The collective’s director Sonia Dymshits shared with us photos of the new performance and told us that while her troupe is meant to be “vagabond, traveling from space to space”, it is resident to the Raznochinnaya Theater. The Book of Paradise is scheduled to be performed again on the same stage on March 19. Manger’s classic has been translated from Yiddish into Russian by Sonia Dymshits’s father, the renowned Yiddish researcher Valery Dymshits, and published in 2008. Written in 1939 and merging elements of Biblical apocrypha, 18th century philosophical satire and pre-WWII Polish cabaret, this book is considered one of the greatest masterpieces of Yiddish literature.

Currently (as of February 27, 2025), the Raznochinnaya Theater’s repertoire features 11 very diverse performances. Like the Moscow theater Shalom, they are geared toward general audience and are not limited to Jewish themes.

Photo credit: Post-Traumatic Theater

Berl Kotlerman Celebrates His Yiddish Poetry Book

Berl Kotlerman Celebrates His Yiddish Poetry Book

Berl Kotlerman Celebrates His Yiddish Poetry Book

On February 19, 2025, the CYCO Yiddish Book Center celebrated the publication of a Yiddish poetry book by Dr. Berl Kotlerman who shared with us the information about this exciting event. The festive evening included a talk with the poet conducted by the renowned Yiddishist veteran Sheva Zucker, and a concert by Deborah Strauss and Jeff Warschauer.

Berl Kotlerman

Kotlerman, a professor and the head of the Rena Costa Center for Yiddish Studies at Bar Ilan University (Israel), is the author and co-author of several books on such diverse aspects of Yiddish culture as Jewish Studies in the Far East, Sholem Aleichem’s implicit influence on early Yiddish cinema and Bauhaus architecture in Birobidzhan, as well as four fiction books in Yiddish. His new poetry collection published by the CYCO and entitled Tkiyes-kaf: Diptikhlekh (“Handshake in Agreement: Little Diptychs”) is written in a novel style: all poems are grouped by pairs of complementary “diptychs” dedicated to different dimensions of the same subject.

The CYCO, Tsentrale yidishe kultur-organizatsye (“Central Yiddish Cultural Organization”), was founded by leading American Yiddish authors and cultural activists in 1938 as a cultural organization with branches throughout the US and as far away as Argentina. Among the authors published by the CYCO were top Yiddish writers of their time, including the Nobel Prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Photo credit: Berl Kotlerman

Yiddish Love Poetry Evening in Berlin

Yiddish Love Poetry Evening in Berlin

Yiddish Love Poetry Evening in Berlin

On February 13, 2025, the informal group Yiddish.Berlin held a Valentine’s Eve celebration: an evening of Yiddish poetry entitled “Libebriv” (Love Letters). Can Valentine’s be also Jewish? Osian Evans Sharma, a Yiddish teacher from England, and Michelle Bernstein, a local Berlin-based Yiddish researcher, who came up with the idea of ​​this event, are convinced that it can!

The participants mainly recited their freshly written Yiddish poems, as well as many works by well-known 20th modernist female poets. Poetic and musical undertakings are a common activity of Yiddish.Berlin; for over five years, the group has already been organizing many similar evenings.

A couple of words about the participants:

Jake Schneider is very much a Berlin poet. His works are infused with fantastic themes and formal plays with language subtleties.

Yael Merlini is an Italian-language poet who started writing in Yiddish two years ago. She writes mystical and erotic songs full of shadowy and sensual images.

Jordan Lee Schnee, like Merlini, started writing poetry in his native language (English) before Yiddish. Besides his own texts, he read two poems by Debora Fogel. He translates her poetry into English and he was the editor of her poetry collections in Spanish and Portuguese translations.

Two newcomers also appeared. Luise Fakler, a musician and historian, recited her own Yiddish poem for the first time. Daria Ma, a poet who writes in Russian and experiments with mixed language poetry, also presented a poem she wrote entirely in Yiddish especially for this event.

I, Katerina Kuznetsova, won’t talk here about my own works — you can read them online following this link, along with all the other texts recited during this Valentine’s evening.

The recitations were alternated by pieces of music. The composer and musician Zhenja Oks performed his compositions he created to Celia Dropkin’s, Itzik Manger’s and Olexander Beyderman’s lyrics.

The evening took place at the Café Chagall. It was also meant to signal a new season of Yiddish programs. The group’s new project “Nu? Yiddish in all art forms”, curated by Jake Schneider, is to be started in March. There are also going to be a series of open mics for all Berliners who are involved in Yiddish creativity.

Katerina Kuznetsova, Berlin

From our editorial staff:

We would like to remind our readers that we already have covered the activities of Yiddish.Berlin more than once and keep following them closely. In 2023 our website featured an article about the Berlin-based poet and Yiddishist Katerina Kuznetsova, accompanied by a number of her poems, which the poet Yoel Matveyev also translated into Russian. We wish her and all her Yiddishist fellows lots of luck and success!

Photo credit: Arndt Beck