Yoel Matveyev
By Yoel Matveyev
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Forverts in English Ryback’s art captured Ukrainian shtetl life before it disappeared
As Russia’s bloodletting in Ukraine continues, we have begun sharing stories about the great contribution that Ukrainian Jews have made to our rich Jewish culture and to the world at large. Today we’ll focus on the renowned avant-garde Jewish painter Issachar Ber Ryback, whose lithographs and paintings portrayed traditional Jewish life in the Ukrainian shtetl,…
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Forverts in English The Talmud bans fortune-telling but most shtetls had someone practicing it
As I was browsing books written about Soviet-Yiddish writers recently in the National Library of Russia, in St. Petersburg, I serendipitously found a 36-page Yiddish pamphlet called “Seyfer hagoyroles” [book of fortune-telling], which described a complex magical method for predicting the future. The book concludes with several alchemical recipes. It was clear that no one…
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Forverts in English Seven Yiddishists tell their story in a new documentary
Read this article in Yiddish Yiddish has appeared, in various guises, with increasing frequency and prominence in cinema in recent years. A new documentary by the French documentary filmmaker Nurith Aviv, simply titled “Yiddish,” debuted on French television last year and can now be streamed online. The film explores the current status of the language…
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Forverts in English How did the letter ayin become a vowel in Yiddish?
Read this article in Yiddish A recent article on the website, Seforim Blog, compares the phonetics of biblical Hebrew and Arabic. In the post, the author, Rabbi Avi Grossman, remarks that he “cannot fathom” why the letter ayin (ע) in Yiddish became a vowel roughly equivalent to the Latin letter E and asks his readers…
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Yiddish נעמען פֿון די בני־ישׂראל ווען זיי זענען געווען שקלאַפֿן אין מצריםNames of the Children of Israel when they were slaves in Egypt
דער נאָמען „שפּ־ראַ‟ – דהײַנו, אַ וואַריאַנט פֿון שיפֿרה — געפֿינט זיך אין אַ פּאַפּירוס, וואָס ליגט הײַנט אינעם ברוקלינער מוזיי.
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Yiddish רוסישע היסטאָריקערין באַשרײַבט ייִדישע פֿאַרברעכנס אינעם שטעטלRussian historian describes Jewish criminal cases in the shtetl
צו לייזן איר קאָמפּליצירטע ליבע־טרויקע, האָט שׂרה ווײַנבלאַט באַשלאָסן צו הרגענען איר מאַן מיט אַ האַק
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Culture A righteous man in hell
Read this article in Yiddish. In October, the German academic publishing house WBG Theiss published the book, “Letters from Hell” (Briefe aus der Hölle), about Jews who served in the Sonderkommando at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. The volume also includes a new translation from the Yiddish memoirs of Rabbi Leib Langfus, prepared by the author…
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Culture Google Translate for Yiddish? It Ain’t Worth Bupkis.
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Several years ago I wrote an article for the Forverts describing the bizarre phenomenon by which a Google search for the innocent Yiddish word “meydlekh” (girls) yielded results for pornographic websites, listings for Canadian escorts and so forth. Were pornographic websites actually advertising in Yiddish? No, it…
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