VIDEO: From under her grandfather’s prayer shawl on Tisha B’Av: Discovering Yiddish
Yiddish activist Gella Schweid Fishman was in the synagogue with her grandfather, when a poster on the wall caught her eye.
Screenshot Photo by the Yiddish Book Center
By Rukhl Schaechter August 13, 2024
When Gella Schweid Fishman was a little girl, she once accompanied her grandfather to shul on Tisha B’Av and saw something on the wall that changed her life: a poster encouraging parents to enroll their children in a local secular Yiddish afternoon school.
The year was about 1932, when there were dozens of Yiddish schools in New York City and other major urban centers throughout the United States. Many Jewish immigrant families from Eastern Europe enrolled their children in these schools, which students attended daily after public school, so that they could learn their parents’ native language and culture.
Fishman, who grew up to become a devoted Yiddish teacher, poet and activist, didn’t come from a Yiddish-speaking home. Her mother had been born and raised in Hungary, where Jews spoke Hungarian, not Yiddish. Her father did speak Yiddish to his own father, but not to her. As an American-born youngster, Fishman’s trajectory in life would likely have been very different, had she not learned about the existence of a Yiddish school in the neighborhood.
The video, which was produced by the Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project, is in Yiddish with English subtitles.
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