Swedish Music Videos Teach Children Yiddish

By Jordan Kutzik December 19, 2017

This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts.

Thanks to Yiddish’s status as an official minority language in Sweden, the Scandinavian nation finances many initiatives to encourage its use. Besides the yearly international Yiddish seminar, a program sponsored by the Yiddish authority in which lecturers and performers from around the world speak to Sweden’s Jewish community in Yiddish, and regular Yiddish-language radio and television broadcasts, the Swedish government supports classes and other programs that teach the language.

Recently, the Sveriges Jiddischförbund, Sweden’s largest Yiddish cultural organization, released a series of 12 music videos in which the singer Heléne Don Lind performs Yiddish children’s songs. In the video series, “Lider mit Glider” (literally: “Songs with Limbs”), Don Lind acts out the songs’ lyrics through motions and exaggerated hand gestures so that children between ages one and eight can learn Yiddish vocabulary by associating words with the movements they see on their computer screens. The project’s website includes not only the videos with transliterated Yiddish subtitles but also recordings of the musical accompaniment so that Yiddish teachers will have the option of performing the songs themselves karaoke style.

In a Skype interview with the Forverts, Paula Grossman of the Sveriges Jiddischförbund explained that her organization decided to create the video series so that Jewish communities in both Sweden and abroad would have more resources for teaching young children Yiddish. In order to choose the best songs, Grossman asked the ethnomusicologist (and Forverts columnist) Dr. Itzik Gottesman and the composer and choir director Benjamin Schaechter for their recommendations. Afterwards, Don Lind narrowed down the recommendations to the twelve songs that she felt would best lend themselves to being performed with explanatory facial expressions and motions. Among the selections are some classic folksongs like “Az Der Rebe Zingt,” “Ot Azoy Neyt a Shnayder,” and “Oy Mayn Kepele,” as well as four more recent songs by Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman: “Der Vint,” “Hamerl,” “Bleter,” and “Di Ban.”

The songs are performed with a musical accompaniment that incorporates both traditional melodies and influences from rock and jazz.

The series, along with YiddishPOP, is pretty much the only modern multimedia tools for parents or teachers who want to introduce young children to Yiddish. Hopefully “Lider mit Glider” will be used in Yiddish classes and inspire similar initiatives.

The videos can be viewed here.

Jordan Kutzik is the deputy editor of the Yiddish Forward. Contact him at [email protected].

A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

The coming year promises to be filled with more complex and historic developments. We are entering an era where independent, fact-based Jewish journalism will be more important than ever. We need to be ready for whatever 2025 will bring, and with your help, we can be.

We’ve set a goal to raise $325,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO