Rukhl Schaechter is the Yiddish editor of the Forward and the producer of the YouTube series, “Yiddish Word of the Day.” She loves cooking, Israeli folk-dancing and talking to her grandchildren.
Rukhl SchaechterYiddish/Forverts Editor
By Rukhl Schaechter
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Culture Absurdity Returns to Chelm
Because Jewish folk humor depicts Chelm as a town inhabited by naive fools, few people realize that Chelm is actually a real town in Eastern Poland that was once home to 18,000 Jews and was highly regarded as a center of Torah study. Now, a half-century after nearly this whole population perished in the death…
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Culture Northern Exposure: Mameloshn’s Unexpected Fate – in Sweden
In the weeks leading up to Sweden’s national election this month, the government put out public service announcements in the press, encouraging its citizens to vote. But one feature was hardly standard issue: The bulletins informed the readers how to get voting instructions in Yiddish. The bulletins served as a reminder of — or, more…
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Israel News When the Anthem Was in Yiddish
The release last Friday of a Spanish version of the “The Star-Spangled Banner” sparked heated debate on radio talk shows and in the blogosphere. Some pundits took to calling the song “The Illegal Alien Anthem.” Even the president has weighed in on the matter. (He’s opposed.) But as one might expect in a country built…
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News Monthly Publication Sets Sights on Young Readers
most people agree that the future of yiddish depends on cultivating a new generation of young people who speak and read the language. In response to the glaring shortage of contemporary reading material for today’s students of Yiddish, the Forverts has begun publishing a monthly news supplement called Vayter (a synonym for “Forward”), written in…
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News Onetime Lubavitcher Creates New Life Out of Whole Cloth
On a recent Sunday evening at the height of New York’s Fashion Week, the Cafe Deville was bustling. Backstage, beneath the downtown bistro’s dining room, designer Levi Okunov’s latest line of coats hung from a set of racks. A hairdresser and a makeup artist were busy doing up the models according to this year’s theme:…
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News Keeping the Land of Milk and Honey Pollution-free
When the Jews of the first aliya arrived in Palestine at the end of the 19th century they found a natural, unblemished landscape. Fast-forward to today and Israel is, ecologically speaking, a mess. According to environmental activist Rabbi Michael Cohen, “the Dead Sea is disappearing, the level of air pollution is doubling every 10 years,…
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News Orthodox Rabbi Sued by Former Congregant
A former congregant has filed a lawsuit against Rabbi Mordecai Tendler, the religious leader of an Orthodox congregation in Monsey, N.Y., accusing him of giving her “sex therapy” when she went to him for counseling. In the lawsuit, which was filed December 20 in Manhattan and reported December 25 in the New York Post, Adina…
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Israel News New Chabad Center Thought To House Ghost
Rabbi Shraga Sherman is apparently not afraid of ghosts. A few weeks ago, Sherman stood in a history-rich building in the Philadelphia suburb of Lower Merion to inaugurate a new Chabad-Lubavitch center. The building, known as the General Wayne Inn, is no run-of-the-mill guesthouse, however. It is, rather, a 300-year-old landmark that, according to local…
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