Leana Jelen, a native Yiddish-speaker who works as a sign-language interpreter, visited the Forverts’ studio to talk about her love of languages and what she enjoys about sign language interpretation. Last fall Jelen starred in a series of Yiddish joke videos produced by the Forverts.
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. This summer marks 50 years since the iconic Woodstock Music Festival, a joyous, muddy event that took place on a farm in the Catskill Mountains. The festival, which attracted more than 400,000 people over three days in August 1969, aimed to spread a message of love and…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Elie Wiesel’s novel “Night,” the original Yiddish title of which translated to “And the World Remained Silent,” is the single best-known book about the Holocaust. It’s studied today in American schools, and for many readers it’s the only source they have on Holocaust history. But in the…
Rukhl Schaechter and Eve Jochnowitz demonstrate how to braid your challah several different ways.
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. On May 13th, a tragedy occurred in Boro Park that shook the local Jewish community and sent shockwaves around the Orthodox Jewish world: A 23-year-old Hasidic man set himself on fire in his car. After the tragedy the directors of 1225, a drop-in center for Hasidic youth…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. I began meeting with “Yehoshua” three years ago to talk about his experience with lifelong mental illness. He was an ideal informant. No subject was off-limits — not family, marriage, work, religion, sexuality or addiction. As a peer counselor for the past eight years with a Bronx-based…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. In the summer of 2012 Aaron Tessler, a student at Johns Hopkins University, visited his grandmother Rachel Tessler in Tel Aviv. A 93-year-old Holocaust survivor, Mrs. Tessler regaled her grandson with stories of her childhood in the Transylvanian village of Romuli. Although Romuli, located in Bistrita-Nasaud County,…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. On a recent Tuesday evening, more than 2,200 fans of the Israeli television show “Shtisel” streamed into Manhattan’s Temple Emanu-el to watch a lively stage discussion with three of the series’s leading actors and its producer. The Israeli drama about an ultra-Orthodox Jewish family in Jerusalem, which…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Tzina Schulman, daughter of Yiddish educator Asya Vaisman Schulman and literary translator and KlezKanada director Sebastian Schulman, will soon turn seven. A child with many talents, she not only speaks Yiddish, English and Russian, but is also learning French and Hebrew at a Jewish day school in…
The first crossword puzzle of this new Forverts column includes several clues about the holiday of Shavuos. To print the Forverts crossword puzzle, click here. Thanks to a generous donation to the Forverts by an anonymous donor, the Forverts has launched a biweekly Yiddish crossword puzzle. The puzzles will include clues about Yiddish words and…
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