A recent violent summer storm toppled countless of graves and split thousands of trees in Warsaw’s Jewish Cemetery. The cemetery, founded in 1806, is largely abandoned and has only a few volunteers to maintain its 83 acres and 250,000 marked headstones. “This scene is terrible,” a visitor told the ultra-Orthodox newspaper Hamevasser. “Thousands of Jewish…
Bucharest, Romania I find myself in Eastern Europe for the “International Festival of Yiddish Theatre,” having been invited by the country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Romania holds the chairmanship of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance in 2016 and has invited the New York based National Yiddish Theatre – Folksbiene to present a play of which…
This past March, three weeks before she passed away, my bubbe, Charlotte Friend, celebrated her ninety-ninth birthday. On that day, as on every other birthday she’d had over the last twenty or so years, she received several phone calls from her Russian friends — women (and a few men) to whom she had taught English…
(JTA) — On his way to several meetings with Dutch parliamentarians last week, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and his entourage passed 300 demonstrators flying Israeli flags. Like the Israeli government, the protesters, who convened outside at the urging of Dutch Jewish and Christian pro-Israel groups, accuse Abbas and his government of supporting deadly attacks…
Three young Europeans – two Muslims and a Jew – met with Obama administration and congressional officials to press for action against anti-Semitism in Europe. The three activists were in Washington this week to receive this year’s Human Rights First Award, bestowed by the group of the same name. The activists are: Jane Braden-Golay, a…
Tomas Stern was born decades after World War II, decades after Nazi Slovak militia fired bullets into a pile of hay, narrowly missing his father — not yet 5 years old — who lay trembling beneath the straw. “They got some information that there are some Jews hiding there, so they ran into the stable,”…
Exploring Ashkenazi Jews And Their Origins
Two recently posted articles in the Jewish Internet magazine Tablet provide an excellent introduction to anyone interested in the fascinating and problem-fraught field of Yiddish historical linguistics. One, by Cherie Woodworth, a scholar of Eastern European history who died last year, at the sadly young age of 46, first appeared in the journal Kritika in…
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