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.
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.
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.
