A Jewish resort in the country for Yiddish speakers of all ages
Each summer, the Yidish Vokh hosts a week filled with workshops, campfires, arts & crafts and sports.
Imagine a Jewish resort in the mountains where graduate students are playing board games and children are splashing in the swimming pool. Senior citizens are listening to dynamic lectures under a large maple tree.
Now imagine them doing all this in Yiddish.
The Yidish Vokh (literally: Yiddish Week), which is sponsored by the Yiddishist organization Yugntruf, has been hosting retreats like this for 48 years. It’s one of the only events outside the Hasidic community for Yiddish speakers of all Jewish denominations. The guests spend an entire week together engaging in a variety of recreational activities, while improving their Yiddish-speaking skills.
The annual event takes place on the grounds of the Berkshire Hills Eisenberg Camps in Copake, New York, along a natural lake surrounded by the Berkshire Mountains. This year the it will be held from Aug. 16-22
All meals are under kosher supervision, with vegan and gluten-free options available. Participants seeking shabbos services can choose between an Orthodox or egalitarian minyan. Others can join a group hiking in the nearby woods.
First-time registrants get a 15% discount.
In the evenings, the guests gather in the theater for a special activity. It could be a college bowl (called freg-geshleg in Yiddish) or a Yiddish version of the game show Family Feud. Or it could be an evening of folk dance and tango accompanied by professional klezmer musicians, or a talent show.
For guests who have no car, there is a bus leaving and returning to midtown Manhattan.
To get more details about the Yidish Vokh, or to sign up, click here.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rukhl Schaechter, Yiddish Editor