Beloved Singer Nechama Lifshitz Has Died
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
By Forverts Staff April 27, 2017
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts.
Nechama Lifshitz, the popular singer who defied the censors by singing in Yiddish and Hebrew throughout the Soviet Union, serving as a deep inspiration for the so-called Jews of Silence under Communist rule, has died at the age of 89.
Nechama Lifshitz was born in Kaunas, Lithuania in 1927. Her father, Dr. Yehuda Hirsch Lifshitz, who had studied in Yitzchak Yaacov Reines’ Yeshiva in Lithuania, was a doctor, businessman and Jewish communal activist. Both of her parents were active in Zionist circles.
During WWII her family fled to Eastern Uzbekistan. After returning to Soviet Lithuania in 1946, Nechama studied at the Vilnius conservatory and appeared as a soloist with the Vilnius Philharmonic Orchestra in 1957.
Her greatest joy, however, was singing in Yiddish and Hebrew. Beginning in 1951, she toured the USSR as a Yiddish singer despite the many restrictions against Jewish performers in those years and quickly became a symbol and a voice for the country’s silenced Jews.
In 1969 she made Aliyah to Israel. She continued to give concerts of Yiddish songs, including “Am Israel Chai,” which the poet Yosef Kerler wrote in her honor and became known as her signature song.
Recordings of her concerts were extremely popular not only in Israel and the USSR but were also a hit with Jews all over the world. She was often invited to give concerts in the USA, Australia, England and Latin America.
Nechama Lifshitz also directed the city of Tel Aviv’s municipal musical library. In 1978, she was awarded the Manger Prize and in 2004 – the Tel Aviv-Jaffa prize. In her final years, she ran a singing workshop to train young Israelis in the art of Yiddish song.
Nechama is survived by her daughter Rose Gartner, her grandchildren Deker and Dalia and her great-grandchildren Guy, Ellah and Shelly.
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.
