Preservation of Yiddish Culture

Preservation of Yiddish Culture and Heritage

Сохранение культуры идиша

אָפּהיטן אונדזער ייִדישע קולטור־ירושה

לשמור על תרבות היידיש

Shtetl on Fontanka

Shtetl on Fontanka

Shtetl on Fontanka

On July 17, 2025, the exhibition “Shtetl on Fontanka. From Chagall to the Present” opened at the KGallery in St. Petersburg. It is dedicated to Jewish artists whose life and work are closely connected to St. Petersburg. Fontanka is one of the city’s rivers. The project’s curator is Dr. Valery Dymshits, a folklorist and scholar of Yiddish literature. The conceptual design of the exhibition was created by the theater artist Valery Polunovsky.

The large three-story exhibition, consisting of seven thematic sections, is permeated with the history and culture of Eastern European Jews. A significant part of the exhibits is directly or indirectly related to Yiddish. For the first time, the works of four generations of Jewish painters, graphic artists and sculptors who worked over the past 150 years in St. Petersburg (historically also known as Petrograd and Leningrad) were brought together. 24 artists are presented in total, from Isaac Asknaziy to Marc Chagall, Nathan Altman, Solomon Yudovin, Anatoly (Tankhum) Kaplan and many other world famous masters.

Visitors who come to the exhibition find themselves in an imaginary Jewish shtetl, as the artists viewed their home city, Leningrad, and get acquainted with the religious traditions of Judaism, Jewish theater, folklore, modern interpretations of Jewish folk art. The presented works allow us to view the city’s Jewish art as a coherent integral cultural phenomenon.

The exhibition is opened until September 14. The editor-in-chief of our website, writer and journalist Yoel Matveyev, attended the press premiere inauguration of the exhibition with the photojournalist Svetlana Smaznova.

Credit: Yoel Matveyev and Svetlana Smaznova

Mieczysław Weinberg’s Yiddish Songs in Nizhny Novgorod

Mieczysław Weinberg’s Yiddish Songs in Nizhny Novgorod

Mieczysław Weinberg’s Yiddish Songs in Nizhny Novgorod

Sofia Zhurkina (left) and Anastasia Djilas
Credit: Anastasia Konovalova

On June 22, 2025, honoring the 80-year WWII Victory anniversary and commemorating the beginning of the Nazi invasion in the USSR, a memorial concert was held at the Nizhny Novgorod Opera and Ballet Theater (Russia). It included works by Boris Tchaikovsky, Dmitri Shostakovich and two cycles of Jewish songs by Mieczyslaw Weinberg, op. 13 and op. 17, performed in Yiddish by tenor Sergei Pisarev and soprano Anastasia Djilas.

Moishe (Mieczyslaw) Weinberg (1919 – 1999) was one of the greatest Soviet composers who authored 26 symphonies, 7 operas and many other musical works. However, only in his two cycles of Jewish Songs, created in 1943 and 1944, he explicitly turns to poetic works written in his native language, Yiddish. Opus 13 is based on the First World War poems by the Yiddish classic poet Yitskhok Leybush Peretz. Opus 17, full of the tragedy and heroism of WWII, is based on the wartime poems of the famous Soviet Yiddish poet Shmuel Halkin (1897 – 1960). Researchers note that both vocal cycles are deeply interconnected.

Anastasia Djilas, a graduate of the Moscow State Conservatory, a soloist of the Nizhny Novgorod Opera and Ballet Theater since 2022, brilliantly performed Weinberg’s cycle of six song based on Halkin’s poems, accompanied by Sofia Zhurkina on the piano. The performance was accompanied by subtitles with a literary Russian translation, which were prepared specially for this concert by the Yiddish and Russian poet Yoel Matveyev based on a draft version by the musicologist Evgeny Khazdan. Sergey Pisarev performed Weinberg’s Opus 13 with the pianist Lyudmila Gorokhova.

Yiddish performances have already become a tradition at the Nizhny Novgorod Opera and Ballet Theater, which in November 2023 held a concert called Menorah Music, where the Yiddish song “Makh tsu di eygelekh” (“Close Your Little Eyes”) was performed by Anastasia Djilas as an encore. Two 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.

It’s worth a note that Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s parents also died in a concentration camp: the Yiddish theater composer Shmuel Weinberg and the Yiddish actress Sonya (Surah-Dvoirah) Weinberg. His 1944 Jewish Songs based on Halkin’s poems are both the composer’s personal requiem and a hymn to the then soon-to-be expected victory.

Credit: Anastasia Konovalova

Sholem Aleichem Monument: 2 Years

Sholem Aleichem Monument: 2 Years

Sholem Aleichem Monument: 2 Years

On June 6, 2023, two years ago, a statue of the great Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem was erected at Tel Aviv University. We are happy to inform our readers about this anniversary.
The creation of this monument by the renowned Soviet and Russian sculptor Yuri Chernov (1935 – 2009) and its installation at Tel Aviv University’s campus had been initiated by our website’s founder, Dr. Mark Zilberquit. The sculptor’s grandson, philanthropist and businessman Alexander Chernov, played an important role in this project.

The installation of Sholem Aleichem’s statue signaled the beginning of new studies of Yiddish language and culture under the guidance of Tel Aviv University’s professors who also organize, besides regular classes, annual festivals celebrating their students’ academic achievements. These ongoing scholarly and cultural activities were made possible in 2023 thanks to two charitable foundations, The Heritage Projects Foundation (USA) and Yiddish Heritage Preservation Foundation (Israel). The studies are supported by Mark and Julia Zilberquit Scholarship.

Peter Thoren, Amos Elad, Julia Zilberquit, Mark Zilberquit, Ariel Porad, Leonard Blavatnik, Avi Fisher.

 Pictures: Yuval Yosef

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.

2025 Jewish Book Day in St. Petersburg

2025 Jewish Book Day in St. Petersburg

2025 Jewish Book Day in St. Petersburg

The annual Jewish Book Day in St. Petersburg, Russia, held at the city’s Great Choral Synagogue on April 27, 2025, included a presentation of the recently published bilingual Russian-Yiddish book Moisey Beregovsky: Essays on the History of Yiddish Folk Music.

The book fair also included two lectures related to Hasidic Yiddish and its speakers. The poet and writer Yoel Matveyev spoke about the sacred status of the language among Hasidim; the renowned researcher Dr. Valery Dymshits presented a recent Russian academic book on Chaim Zanvil Abramowitz, the Rybnitser Rebbe, largely based on Yiddish materials gathered in American Hasidic communities.

Photo credit: Jeps.ru and Alexandra Yegorova

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.