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
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
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!
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.
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
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
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