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Editor’s note: February 19 marks the yahrzeit of a pogrom carried out in the Ukrainian shtetl of Felshtin in 1919. The massacre was perpetrated by the Ukrainian national army and Jews held Semyon Vassilievitch Petliura, head of the Ukrainian parliament, responsible. In one day, 600 Jewish men, women and children were brutally murdered or critically…
My great-grandmother Chana Klein, whom we all called Bubbie, was a powerhouse at 4’10” and an accomplished Jewish cook who didn’t share recipes. When she was a widow, all the men in the morning minyan at my shul chased her, but she was faithful to her beloved husband who she met only once before her…
On Thursday, February 17, a new book of Yiddish plays that have been translated into English, will be celebrated both in person and on Zoom at 7 p.m. EST. Join YIVO for this free event, filled with scenes of romance, political symbolism and low comedy all deftly translated by Yiddish theater scholar Nahma Sandrow, and…
To play Vertl, click here. On February 10, Vertl – the Yiddish version of the hugely popular game, Wordle – came under the auspices of the Forverts, enabling the game to reach many more players. Initially, there were two Yiddish forms of Wordle, both launched in mid-January: one created by Masha Leyfer and Gabrielle Taylor,…
According to family lore, Sophie’s mother was a first cousin of Marc Chagall’s mother, Feige-Ita.
These are the hats that my mother and uncles bought when bartering to survive in Uzbekistan during the Holocaust years. My mother was only twelve years old and her brothers – 14 and 9 years of age – when she and her family left Horodenka, Ukraine in 1941 and took the long treacherous journey to…
This story is part of the Forverts series, “Our Favorite Heirlooms.” This stuffed raccoon belonged to my grandfather, Abraham Melezin, known to his close friends and family as Abrasha; I called him Papa. Here’s the story: A Holocaust survivor, Papa was born in Odessa and received a PhD in geography from Stefan Batory University in…
In the Chabad yeshiva in Crown Heights, where I was a student in the early 1980s, Yiddish literature was non-existent. Sure, we spoke Yiddish in school and we read the text of the Rebbe’s Yiddish sermons, but Yiddish literature was never mentioned. Then again, we didn’t read English literature either. We studied the Torah, Talmud,…
“Normally, a poster would not include so much empty space. But any poster about Lublin must contain empty space,” Robert told me. I was standing in the print shop of Dom Słów or The House of Words in Lublin, Poland, next to visionary printer Robert Sawa in his signature ink-stained apron, his long graying hair…
Read this article in Yiddish. Transatlantic Russian Jewishness: Ideological Voyages of the Yiddish Daily Forverts in the First Half of the Twentieth Century Gennady Estraikh Academic Studies Press, $119, 354 pp In the history of American journalism, the Forverts is a genuine outlier. Over the course of the first half of the last century, the…
As the Yiddish proverb goes: “Hob mikh veyniker lib, nor hob mikh lang lib – love me less, but love me long.” I don’t see this as a popular saying among millennials, just as it wasn’t for us yidn in di yorn (Jews getting on in years) when we were young ourselves. Being swept up…
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