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…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Thanks to a generous donation to the Forverts by an anonymous donor, the Forverts has launched a biweekly Yiddish crossword puzzle. The puzzles include clues about Yiddish words and literature, Jewish traditions and pop culture. The first puzzle can be seen here. The donor, a Jewish philanthropist,…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. A remarkable history of women’s poetry in Yiddish was recently published by Joanna Lisek, a scholar of Polish literature. The book is currently available only in its native Polish, but it’s imperative that it be translated into English as well. The monograph, “Kol Ishe: The Voice of…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. It is part of a series on Forverts memories written by and about present and past Forverts writers and editors. More than thirty years ago, at the beginning of the 1980s, Forverts assistant editor David Matis, who also happened to be a friend of my father’s, invited…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Last month, I embarked on a dream of mine: a 10-day Hebrew immersion in Israel with the aim to finally become fluent in the language. For years, I’ve been studying Hebrew, both through classes and on my own. Every Shabbat afternoon I get together with my friends…
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