VIDEO: Learn why dumplings are a Purim tradition
Rukhl Schaechter and Eve Jochnowitz demonstrate how to make this tasty dish the way East European Jews did it for centuries and explain why it’s a Purim specialty.
Yiddish World
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The colorful stories about my ancestor from Uman, Ukraine
In light of the ongoing war in Ukraine, I’d like to share a little bit of our own family history during a period when Ukraine had hundreds of thriving Jewish communities. Growing up in Detroit, I heard many stories of what life was like for my family in dreym (in the old country) in Uman,…
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Growing up, as a biracial child, with survivor grandparents
Kyla Kupferstein Torres, whose mother was Black Jamaican, describes how her father's parents helped form her Jewish identity
The Latest
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Growing up as a young Jewish girl in the Ukrainian countryside
This is one in a series of stories submitted by readers about their ancestors’ experiences growing up in Ukraine, during a time when it was a thriving center of Jewish life. My grandmother, Perl (we called her Paula) Braver or Braverman, was a fair-haired, blue-eyed woman who usually wore her long hair in braids atop…
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Heirloom: A blouse made of fabric hidden from the Nazis
This story is part of the Forverts series, “Our Favorite Heirlooms.” My favorite heirloom is a blouse that my mother made with fabric that she had hidden from the Nazis before being deported to the notorious Majdanek concentration camp on the outskirts of Lublin, Poland. Before the war, my mother lived in Radom, Poland, a…
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Why I think Putin Bombed Babyn Yar
On March 1, 2022, artillery shells fired by the Russian Army in Ukraine fell in and near Babyn Yar (also known as Babi Yar), the Holocaust’s largest mass grave. On September 29-30, 1941, led by the SS commanders, a large number of Einsatzgruppen, Wehrmacht and German police units as well as Ukrainian collaborators combined to…
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VIDEO: The Ukrainian national anthem in Yiddish
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last week, the latter’s national anthem, hauntingly called ‘Ukraine Has Not Yet Perished’, has become a song of protest against Russian aggression throughout Ukraine and around the world. Ukraine’s national anthem sung inside a bomb shelter. pic.twitter.com/3hDSWx7Zuk — Alejandro Alvarez (@aletweetsnews) February 26, 2022 The anthem, whose melody was adopted…
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Now streaming: Musician’s fascinating journey to find Ukrainian Jewish folksongs
In the 1920s, after the horrific pogroms that followed the Russian Revolution, a Jewish musician and ethnomusicologist named Moyshe Beregovsky, also known as Moisei Iakovlevich Beregovskii, travelled across Ukraine with a phonograph in hand, seeking to record the authentic Yiddish music of Ukrainian Jewry. Among the hundreds of songs that he collected were Yiddish folk…
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How we Jews deal with forgetfulness and other signs of aging
Last summer, as we hosted a number of friends for brunch at our new home in Newport, Rhode Island, there was one question that kept coming up. After the initial “How was the traffic?” and the well-known COVID-related question, “Are you hugging these days?” we would walk out onto the patio, make ourselves comfortable and…
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Heirloom: A notebook with my mother’s beautiful handwriting
This story is part of the Forverts series, “Our Favorite Heirlooms.” My favorite heirloom is a notebook that my mother used when she was learning Hebrew as a teenager. My mother Cypora (Cesi in Polish, Sylvia in English) was born in Przytyk, Poland in 1928, site of an infamous pogrom during the interwar period. Her…
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Old Letters Revealed Her Parents’ Holocaust Experiences
Eleanor Reissa The Letters Project: A Daughter’s Journey Post Hill Press, 289 pp. –––––––––––––––––––––––– The Holocaust left considerable traces – some obvious, some hidden – on the Jewish collective soul, and although it took place far from America’s shores, it’s become an integral part of American history. Tens of thousands of survivors immigrated here, most…
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