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In March, I couldn’t take my eyes off of the news. Twice a day I tuned in to hear about the Russian-Ukrainian front. The war, taking place far from the United States and surely at a distance from my slice of heaven in Florida where I’ve been for the past six months, proves the lie…
On Tuesday, April 19 at 1 p.m. there will be an in-person commemorative program dedicated to the Jewish men and women who fought in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The event will take place in Riverside Park, Manhattan. Since 1947, when the City of New York earmarked a site for a memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto…
Some of the best descriptions of shtetl life come from the stories and essays by the Yiddish writer B. Gorin (1868-1925). Author of the first book about the history of the Yiddish theater, Gorin also had an eye for writing about everyday life, both in Europe and in America. In his book “Fargesene nigunim” (“Forgotten…
Just about 78 years ago, my grandmother, of blessed memory, was taken from her family’s Passover Seder by the Nazis. She lived in the Carpathian mountain region in what is today known as Western Ukraine. She certainly didn’t think of herself as a Ukrainian, but rather as a Jew. And yet, it is hard, as…
Many of you know about the Forverts cooking show “Est Gezunterheyt”, which I’ve been co-hosting with Yiddish gourmet chef Eve Jochnowitz for almost 12 years. But we also produced another series, Timeless Delicacies, in which we asked people with Jewish roots in Eastern Europe to share their favorite recipes growing up and then we went…
A new Yiddish artists collective in Melbourne has released two videos of mystical Yiddish poetry set to music. The artists collective, called “Di Farborgene Khalyastre” (“The Gang of the Concealed”), took the name from a major Yiddish cultural avant-garde movement in Warsaw in the early 1920s which brought together poets, novelists dedicated to European expressionism,…
Yisroel Leshes, Assistant Cantor at Lincoln Square Synagogue, has released a video of the African-American spiritual “Go Down, Moses” in Yiddish – with a jazzy twist. Leshes has previously infused Yiddish songs with jazz elements, as in his release of the song “Younger World”. In this video, he performs “Go Down, Moses” during a live…
The photographs of Ukrainian children clutching stuffed animals, peering through train windows, and tearfully hugging their fathers—who are also weeping—as they flee their war-torn homeland, are not only heartbreaking. For American Jews with long memories of the destruction of East European Jewish culture in Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian lands, it also feels like a nauseating…
This is a translation from the story written in Hasidic Yiddish. Read the original here. When I was a kid, I used to read stories late at night on Fridays about the great Hasidic tzadikim, the righteous ones. Some of these stories were about the lamed-vovniks, the 36 hidden tzadikim among us on whose merits…
When I was a child, I was always intrigued by the ornate, slightly crooked silver candlesticks in my aunt’s dining room, maybe because they stood out from the otherwise clean, modern decor. At some point, my aunt told me they had belonged to her grandmother – my great-grandmother. After I got married, my aunt, who…
On March 6, when the horror and shock of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine were still intensely fresh, the Forverts ran an article about Kropyvnytskyi-born Jewish artist Issachar Ber Ryback. I was instantly hooked by the accompanying image: an Old World Jewish craftsman, laboring in a candle-lit workshop. When I began to read through the Yiddish…
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