Tel Aviv: Yiddish Summer School

The second annual Yiddish Summer School at Tel Aviv University is the largest such program in the world - with more than 100 students enrolled. Program directors are Professors Hana Wirth-Nesher and Avraham Novershtern.

Many of the students are non-Jewish, and attendees come from as far away as Hong Kong, Japan, Australia, Netherlands, Poland and Germany.

The sessions include classes as well as Yiddish lectures, tours, theater, concerts, museums, films and cultural events.

The Jewish Museum in Warsaw is sponsoring three non-Jewish Polish university students who will interview Polish Holocaust survivors in Israel.

According to the Tel Aviv University site:

For someone like Gosha Koziel, a non-Jewish student from the University of Lodz, the study of Yiddish is bound to an interest in the Jewish people. "It's important for many Polish people to understand the culture of the Jews in Poland before the war," says Koziel, who attended the program last year. Meanwhile Alyse Nagele, a non-Jewish student from Lichtenstein, has an appreciation for the language itself. "I always felt very attracted to the Yiddish language," explains Nagele. "It's combination of High German, Polish, Russian and Hebrew is part of what makes Yiddish such a vibrant language.

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