Donor Saves L.A. Yiddish Program
A major contribution from an anonymous donor will allow a pilot program that teaches Yiddish to Los Angeles high-school students to survive.
Yiddishkayt Los Angeles, a not-for-profit organization devoted to furthering Yiddish in the area, recently received an unsolicited $250,000 gift earmarked for a program that aims to bring Yiddish-language classes into high schools.
“It’s the kind of thing you just wait for, but you can’t believe when it does happen,” said Aaron Paley, founder and board chair of Yiddishkayt Los Angeles. “It was a strong vote of confidence in the project.”
The program was conceived three years ago as a means of introducing Yiddish instruction before students get to college, where the language is primarily taught. Launched with an initial grant from Steven Spielberg’s Righteous Persons Foundation, the program is now being implemented at a local Jewish day school the San Fernando Valley, the New Community Jewish High School, where students take Yiddish class during the school day.
According to Paley, it marks the first time that Yiddish has been taught in an American high school just as any other foreign language would be — as part of the regular curriculum.
The anonymous donation came just as the dollars from the project’s initial grant were starting to dry up, Paley said. This new influx of funds, to be parceled out over a five-year period, will be primarily used to develop a high-school textbook that Yiddishkayt Los Angeles ultimately hopes to publish and distribute internationally.
Launched in 1995, Yiddishkayt Los Angeles sponsors Yiddish-themed events and festivals around the city, including one held in Little Tokyo in 2004. This year it sponsored a series of Yiddish “salons” that included an evening with the authors of “Yiddish With Dick and Jane.”
“We’re trying to create an alternative pathway to Jewish identity and an intergenerational connection,” Paley said.
This is a moment of great uncertainty. Here’s what you can do about it.
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news this Passover. All donations are being matched by the Forward Board - up to $100,000.
This is a moment of great uncertainty for the news media, for the Jewish people, and for our sacred democracy. It is a time of confusion and declining trust in public institutions. An era in which we need humans to report facts, conduct investigations that hold power to account, tell stories that matter and share honest discourse on all that divides us.
With no paywall or subscriptions, the Forward is entirely supported by readers like you. Every dollar you give this Passover is invested in the future of the Forward — and telling the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
The Forward doesn’t rely on funding from institutions like governments or your local Jewish federation. There are thousands of readers like you who give us $18 or $36 or $100 each month or year.
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
