Museum of Family History: Yiddish Theatre name index transliterared

Steve Lasky of the virtual Museum of Family History has transliterated from Yiddish to English the 2,700 names of individuals and organizations in the six volumes of the "Lexicon of the Yiddish Theatre" by Zalmen Zylbercweig.

Read more here at Steve's blog and do look at the Museum of Family History's offerings as new information is frequently added.

His list includes an individual's surname, given name, alternate name, dates of birth and death, town and country of birth (if listed in the Lexicon). Steve used YIVO orthographic (name spelling) standards in his transliteration.

There are more than 2,700 individual names, and 30 organizations are also included in the master list. The most-frequently listed place of birth is Warsaw (with 213 mentions), more than twice the number of the second most-frequently listed birth place of Lodz. Others include Odessa, Lemberg, Vilna and Iasi.

There is also much biographical information for personalities that remains to be translated. Contact Steve if you'd like to volunteer in this respect.

The Lexicon volumes were published in New York City, Warsaw or Mexico City from 1931-1969.

He's hoping to create a free, searchable database where those interested can look up the more than 2,700 names and organizations listed. The Lexicon also contains many photos (individual portraits of the individuals and also of Yiddish productions).

Click here to find the six-volume set of the "Lexicon" and search for Lek?sik?on fun Yidishn teater, the Yiddish title transliterated.

Those who have an interest in Yiddish theatre and its personalities should contact Steve for more information.

Thank you, Steve, for another fascinating contribution to making Yiddish culture more accessible to a wider audience.

New York: National Yiddish Theatre, Dec. 12

Attendees of the 2006 New York international Jewish genealogy conference will remember the hit evening performance by Zalmen Mlotek.
Motek, director of the National Yiddish Theatre-Folksbiene, will present "100 Years of Yiddish Musical Theatre" with guest Daniella Rabbani and the New Yiddish Chorale at the Kingsborough Performing Arts Center on Sunday, December 12, at 3pm. Tickets are $25.

An internationally recognized authority on Yiddish folk and theater music, he is the artistic director of the nation’s only Yiddish Theatre,, travels the world giving concerts, lectures and other programs.

"100 Years of Yiddish Musical Theatre" was hailed as the “runaway hit” of the Berkeley Jewish Music Festival and was highly praised by Yiddishkayt L.A., while Ms. Rabbani’s performance was deemed “utterly alive” by the New York Observer.

This elegant piece celebrates the Jewish musical accent in American theatre, beginning with the origins of the Yiddish theatre in the wine cellars of Rumania and treating us to operetta arias, humorous vaudeville ballads, backstage renditions of Fiddler on the Roof, and more. Simultaneous English translations are projected on a large screen.

For tickets, click here, or call 718-368-5596.

Michigan: Yiddish World Remembered, Dec. 12

"A Yiddish World Remembered" - a documentary - will be presented at the next meeting of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Michigan on Sunday, December 12.

 

The screening takes place at 11am at the Holocaust Memorial Center, 28123 Orchard Lake Road, Farmington Hills. Members, free; others, $5.Reservations are suggested. Contact the JGSMi

Narrated by Academy Award nominated actor Elliott Gould and accompanied by never-before-seen archival films, vintage photographs, and, of course, traditional Klezmer and cantorial music, the documentary takes a realistic and enlightening look at this unique and all-but-vanished way of life.

For those in rural communities, there was often no running water or electricity. For many, anti-Semitism was a part of daily life. But for everyone, crowded conditions and poverty seemed to prevail. Despite these trials, through the eyes of the individuals interviewed, we learn that Jewish communities were close-knit and often even joyous places to live. This television special explores everything from the fascinating language of Yiddish to the Rabbis and Rebbes that often ran the communities to the powerful Jewish movements of Khasidism, Bundism and Zionism.

Jewish Music: International winners announced

Musicians in the family?

Here are more you may not have known about. They are the winners of the second International Jewish Music Festival, held in Amsterdam.

Participants included 24 groups from 12 countries.

As in 2008, the Amsterdam-based festival managed to attract top ensembles from around the world to this unique competition. The pre-selected 24 ensembles came from 12 countries and four continents. For them, this is a one-of-a-kind opportunity to showcase their talent for an audience of programmers, agents and aficionados. The jury included world-renowned Yiddish singer Adrienne Cooper and klezmer expert Hankus Netsky.

Eight workshops were also presented, incuding Adrienne Cooper's Yiddish/Ladino masterclass and the famed Hankus Netsky's Instant Klezmer workshop.

The first-place winner was a Chassidic band, The Heart & The Wellspring (Israel).

Other winners:

Mames Babegenush (Denmark)
Voice of the Levites (Israel)
Shir (UK) - Best Yiddish song
Di Gojim (Netherlands)
Yonit Shaked Golan & Gabi Argov (Israel)
Lafra (Spain) - Best Sephardic performance
Klezmafour (Poland)
Trio C Tot De Derde (Netherlands)
Vent d'Ouest Klezmer Band (France)

To view an 11-minute documentary of the finale, click here.

New York: Yiddish theater program, June 14

Interested in Yiddish theater?

The Congress for Jewish Culture, the CYCO and the Yiddish Artists and Friends Actors' Club will host an evening in memory of the late Yiddish actor David Rogow, with an English lecture on Yiddish theater by Nahma Sandrow and a Yiddish song selection by Allen Lewis Rickman and Yelena Shmulenson ("A Serious Man:).

The event is set for Monday, June 14, and begins with a 6.30pm reception, followed by the program at 7pm, at the Yiddish Artists and Friends' Actors Club, 31 E. 7th St., Manhattan.

Sandrow, author of "Vagabond Stars" ( a world history of Yiddish theater) will give the first Rogow Memorial Lecture on Yiddish Theater, "Melodrama and Truth on the Yiddish Stage."

She also wrote "Kuni-Leml," the long-running off-Broadway musical comedy based on Goldfadn's classic. Her translations of Yiddish plays have been published and performed, and she is currently translating "Yankl der shmid" on a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. She has lectured at Oxford, Harvard, Brown and other universities, the Lincoln Center Young Directors' Lab, the Smithsonian and the National Yiddish Book Center.

The event is free and open to the public, but space is limited. To reserve, send an email.

Yiddish Book Center gets $3 million gift

The National Yiddish Book Center is expanding its Yiddish language program, thanks to a surprise $3 million bequest from television comedy writer Mickey Ross, who died in May at age 89.

According to a Center press release, "This is truly a historic gift, the largest in the Book Center's history," said founder and president Aaron Lansky.

In a separate email received today by Tracing the Tribe, Lansky writes:

Along with his incredibly generous cash gift -- the residual is still to come -- Mr. Ross left the Yiddish Book Center a permanent, 25% share of his rights to "All in the Family" and other shows. As one of our Board members wrote on hearing the news, "To think that Yiddish will benefit every time Archie Bunker utters an ethnic slur on a rerun is almost too delicious to absorb!"

The National Yiddish Book Center, established 30 years ago, says the bequest was a surprise. Lansky said, "As far as we know, Mickey Ross never visited here and we never met face-to-face."

An Emmy winner, Ross worked on such television comedies as "All in the Family," "The Jeffersons" and "Three's Company."

Lansky says the Center's intention is to create a Yiddish university for the hands-on exploration of Jewish language, history and culture. It will make possible the appointment of a full-time Yiddish language instructor to design and teach intensive Yiddish courses - both online and on-site.

The Center's endowment was about $8 million and with this gift, grew to $11 million. The annual budget is about $3.5 million.

Ross died at age 89 following stroke and heart attack complications.

In 2009, he created - with a $4 million gift - the Michael and Irene Ross Program in Jewish Studies at his alma mater, UCLA, endowing a chair in Yiddish language and culture. Ross also made bequests to YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, and the Los Angeles Jewish Foundation.

Learn more about the Center's history, goals and year-round programs.

Maryland: University to drop Yiddish

Yiddish is on the budget chopping block at the University of Maryland.

For those who may be unfamiliar with the language, Yiddish dates to the 11th century and those Jews who settled along the Rhine River. It is written with Hebrew characters, uses German grammar and structure and its vocabulary incorporates German, Hebrew, Aramaic and Slavic.

While the 1,000-year-old language of Ashkenazi Jews has survived the likes of Hitler and Stalin, the switch to Hebrew in modern Israel and the assimilation of immigrants to America, there are few universities that offer it (Brandeis, Harvard, Columbia and a few others).

Not to get too far off track, but Tracing the Tribe believes it is even harder to find a Ladino course - anywhere - for today's generation of Sephardic students. No matter the language - Yiddish or Ladino - it is a shame to lose any part of one's heritage!

But in Maryland, funding is the problem.

I'm sad that our family lost both Yiddish and Russian in 1905, when my great-grandmother proclaimed to her children that they were now Americans and must speak English. While Yiddish remained the family's "house" (and community) language and my grandmother and her siblings were fluent, my mother was fluent as a child but gradually - through disuse - lost her ability to speak it. She understood it, but answered questions in English. Our generation knows even less and is familiar only with a relatively small number of words that we use correctly.

I've had the opportunity to take an elementary Yiddish class and also a beginning Russian class, so perhaps I recognize more than most, but nothing near the level I'd like to have achieved.

Growing up in New York City, of course, many Yiddish words are part of New York-speak, and many immigrants of other ethnicities don't know the origin of words they may use every day.

This Baltimore Sun story by Matthew Hay Brown covers the University of Maryland situation.

At the University of Maryland, which has stood alongside Harvard and Columbia as one of the nation's few schools to consistently offer instruction in the Germanic tongue, the recent announcement that the Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Center for Jewish Studies would be dropping it in the fall shocked area enthusiasts.

"U- Maryland has had the biggest commitment to Yiddish as a language anywhere in a hundred-mile radius," says Harvey Spiro, president of Yiddish of Greater Washington, which organized a letter-writing campaign. "We're not a particularly political organization, but this kicked us in the gut."

The center now has cobbled together the money to pay its longtime instructor through the next academic year. But after that, director Hayim Lapin says, it is unlikely to continue funding a full-time faculty member dedicated to the language.

Said Lapin, it isn't about the language but about the budget crisis resulting in fewer visiting faculty, less Bible, less history and less or no Yiddish.

Born in postwar Germany where Yiddish was her first language, Professor Miriam Isaacs has taught elementary and intermediate Yiddish at Maryland for 15 years:

"We're at a critical point in that the generation of Holocaust survivors, my parents, they're not around anymore," she says. "Or if they're around, they can't do a lot of translating. So if nobody learns it, you know, the Holocaust Museum archive is full of Yiddish materials. The University of Maryland has been acquiring Yiddish books galore. Who is going to read them? Who is going to be able to have access to them?"

And what about those Yiddishisms currently in use in English? Spiro says that because so many comedians used the words, people believe the language is funny or for dirty jokes, while he says, that isn't his Yiddish:

"The Yiddish that I read and the Yiddish I speak is a language for everyday communication. I read novels in Yiddish. I read the Yiddish newspaper."

Yiddish culture incorporated an active press, popular theater and literature - it wasn't just the world of Borscht Belt comedians. World War II decimated Yiddish speakers. Prior to the Holocaust, there were some 11 million speakers. Half were killed, others lost in pogroms and immigration. Today fewer than 2 million live in mainly Orthodox communities in a few cities.

However, in some communities, it is considered a way for today's generation to connect with their heritage. In Poland, the US and in Israel, there are language programs and summer institutes to help them learn.

Isaacs says that, at Maryland, mostly Jewish students register. These include students who have Yiddish-speaking relatives and want to see it remain alive. She says the intensive elementary fall course fills, but a much smaller number continue with the spring intermediate class.

The language has fallen victim to budget problems derived from lower returns on endowments. The center is trying to at least schedule the classes on a per-course basis for those interested. According to experts quoted in the story, Hebrew is required in a serious Jewish studies program, although Yiddish isn't, but should be.

On the other hand, for Sephardim, it is even harder to find a Ladino course than for Ashkenazi to find Yiddish courses.

Read the complete story at the link above.

New York: Jewish Film Festival, Jan. 13-28

The 19th New York Jewish Film Festival will run January 13-28, sponsored by The Jewish Museum and The Film Society of Lincoln Center.

NYBlueprint.com offered details.

The Jewish Museum and The Film Society of Lincoln Center will present the 19th annual New York Jewish Film Festival at The Film Society’s Walter Reade Theater, The Jewish Museum, and The JCC in Manhattan, January 13-28, 2010.

The festival’s 32 features and shorts from 13 countries—28 screening in their U.S. or New York premieres—present a diverse global perspective on the Jewish experience. Several filmmakers and special guests will join in onstage discussions following the screenings.

Films include the New York premiere of Lukás Pribyl’s “Forgotten Transports: To Poland,“ which looks into the lives of Czech Jews deported by the Nazis to camps and ghettos in Eastern Poland’s Lublin region during the Holocaust. I've known Lukás since he came to Israel to interview and film survivors.

There will also be two restored archival films: (1947) "The Axe Of Wandsbek," (1935) Yiddish classic "Bar Mitzvah," with Boris Thomashefsky in his only film performance. The other films and documentaries:

"Saviors in the Night"
"Within the Whirlwind"
"Einsatzgruppen: The Death Brigades"
"The Jazz Baroness"
"Mary and Max,"
"Ajami"
"Eyes Wide Open"
"Ultimatum"
"Valentina's Mother"
"Protector"
"Berlin '36"
"Gruber’s Journey"
"Happy End."
"Gevald!"
"Chronicle of a Kidnap"
"Ahead of Time"
"Making the Crooked Straight"
"Human Failure"
"Leap Of Faith"
"Leon Blum: For All Mankind"
"A History of Israeli Cinema"
"Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness"
"The Peretzniks"

For details on each film or documentary, tickets and all festival information, click here.

Most screenings will be at the Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater, with other screenings at The Jewish Museum (5th and 92nd St.) and the JCC in Manhattan (Amsterdam at W. 76th St.). Single tickets are $11; seniors, $8; Film Society and Museum members and students, $7.

Library of Congress: Yiddish radio webcast

Scholar Henry Sapoznik of the Yiddish Radio Project spoke on the Yiddish radio phenomenon at the Library of Congress.

View the webcast - "Hear, O Israel: Yiddish-American Radio 1925-1955" (recorded in October 2009) - here.

Sapoznik says Yiddish radio existed only in America. At one time, 180 stations were broadcasting (1925-1955) in mame loshen; 25 in New York. Most were in large cities like New York, Philadelphia, Boston and Chicago, but Yiddish programs were also broadcast in Memphis, Dallas, Salt Lake City and Sioux City, Iowa

While some stations reached a large geographical area, one small 50-watt station in Brooklyn broadcast from a clothing store. If they opened the window, he said, they'd reach more people!

The lecture offers a glimpse of the most memorable and powerful moments in this nearly lost world of ethnic American broadcasting.

In the 1940s, the New York radio stations provided a place for the community's diversity to show. Programs included cantorial music (and even female cantors, who couldn't then sing in synagogues but reached listeners on the radio), pop music, quiz shows (with Victor Packer), rabbinical advice programs, live Yiddish theater acts, man-on-the-street interviews to the news of the day in verse (with Zvee Scooler) and much more.

To hear 26 gems from these shows, click here.

In 1933, the first-ever broadcast court program was House of Justice, with Rabbi Rubin, who listened to problems listeners brought to him. It was a first time for public mediation.

Yiddish radio also kept Yiddish theater alive. One anecdote concerned a series, "Men Without Eyes," the story of a girl disfigured in a fire and married off to a blind man. One episode announced there would be a live wedding and invited listeners to attend. Not only did they come, but they also brought wedding gifts!

According to Sapoznik, the radio took a folk culture and adapted it to a popular culture. And there were shows that showed how people really interacted in their own language.

An announcement was made on one station that Mr. Goldberg was 111. There was a musical interlude, and the announcer returned with a correction. Goldberg was ill, not 111 years old.

Commercials were important, giving local businesses and local products an opportunity to be a patrons of the arts, to buy air time to support specific shows.

Do you remember My-T-Fine pudding? It was one show's sponsor. Usually the ad was for chocolate pudding. One day, the company announced a new flavor, nut-chocolate. Of course, it was broadcast in Yiddish. Listeners called in and asked "If it is NOT chocolate, so what flavor is it?" Accents and language were everything.

Another popular show was "The Jewish Philosopher" (Der Pilosof), the Dr. Phil of his day - even though the supposed letters from listeners were written by his brother-in-law. What was more interesting was that St. Joseph Aspirin, a national product, was the sponsor.

Manischewitz sponsored the Jewish Children's Hour. Its producer had seven shows running simultaneously. It focused on Yiddish cultural education in New York among listeners who came from various communities (Yiddish, religious, social, etc.). Sholom Segunda was its musical director, and he wrote "Bei Mir bist du schoen."

"Song Book" aired Yiddish songs and compiled a book of favorites for their audience. If a listener sent in a postcard, s/he would receive the songbook. It may have been the first audience survey and done on a very low budget. It helped the show to understand its audience size.

Some announcers, like Zvee Scooler, read the news in verse. mixing daily folk and culture life with the responsibilities of a news show. This wasn't found in mainstream media.

Read more about the Yiddish Radio Project and view the 57-minute webcast by Sapoznik.

Sapoznik is a record producer (four Grammy nominations), a radio documentarian, an author, and a performer of traditional Yiddish and American music. He received a 2002 Peabody award for his 10-week National Public Radio series on the history of Jewish broadcasting, The Yiddish Radio Project, the 2000 ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for Music Scholarship for his book "Klezmer! Jewish Music from Old World to Our World," and an Emmy nomination for his score to the documentary film, "The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg." He founded the Max and Frieda Weinstein Archives of Recorded Sound at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, as well as Living Traditions' annual KlezKamp: The Yiddish Folk Arts Program.

Video: Yiddish melodies in swing

"Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen" - one of the greatest Yiddish songs - is performed by a host of performers of all backgrounds via this clip from the Yiddish Radio Project.

Listen here to A musical montage of various recordings of "Bei Mir" by Guy Lombardo, Ella Fitzgerald, Benny Goodman (who played it at Carnegie Hall), Lee Marjane, Zarah Leander, Felix & His Crazy Cats, the Lennon Sisters, Jimmy Rushing, Louis Prima and Judy Garland.

Recorded by almost every every pop and jazz artist, translated into many languages, it was also a hit in Hitler's Germany, "until the Nazi Party discovered that its composer was a Jew, and that the song's title was Yiddish rather than a south German dialect."

Listen to a 16-minute NPR documentary on the Project, focused on Yiddish Melodies in Swing, sponsored by the Manischewitz Company. The program ran for nearly 20 years, from 1938, when it had a large studio with a live audience of 1,000 and a large orchestra - all of which dwindled through the years.

Don't miss the exhibit about crooner Seymour Rexite (originally Rechtzeit - for the genealogists reading this!) and listen to his Yiddish versions of "Surrey with a Fringe on Top/Oh, What a Beautiful Morning," 1948; "Tea for Two," (with Miriam Kressyn), c1950; "Love and Marriage," (with Miriam Kressyn) c1950; "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," 1954; Barbasol jingle, 1948; and the Ajax jingle, 1952.

In "Love and Marriage," note that "horse and carriage" are now geyt tzuzamen vi zup un knaydlakh (go together like soup and matzoh balls).

There's much more on this Yiddish radio phenomenon as the Library of Congress has recently posted a video presentation on the topic by scholar Henry Sapoznik of the Yiddish Radio Project, recorded October 14. 2009. This presentation is detailed in another Tracing the Tribe post.

New York: Yiddish notes

Yiddish music is experiencing a revival, based on collections in various archives and through releases of recorded music from those collections.

The New York Jewish Week's Jonathan Mark reported on the Mayrent Collection which is now available - in part - as a three-CD set with 67 tracks compiled from old 78s. “Cantors, Klezmorim & Crooners 1905-1953” ($25, JSP Records/Living Traditions) as released to mark KlezKamp's 25th anniversary and the festival of Yiddish music and art, set for December 23-29.

The music is from the collection of Sherry Mayrent. She is associate director of KlezKamp and Living Traditions, a Yiddish arts preservation group, of which ethnomusicologist Henry Sapoznik is an important figure.

On eBay, Mayrent found 100 cantorial records - the collection of a deceased cantor - and paid $40 for them in 2004. Later, she bought another mostly-klezmer collection of 200 recordings. Over five years, she acquired some 5,000 Yiddish recordings of all genres (from cantorial to comedians and everything inbetween).

According to the story, only 6,000 Yiddish recordings (pre-1942) were produced in the US, with another $5,000 in Europe prior to the Holocaust.

Ethnomusicologist Henry Sapoznik, of the nonprofit Living Traditions, is a partner on the project and wrote the album booklet. The five-time Grammy winner for early folk and country music productions, also received a Peabody Award for his "Yiddish Radio Project."

In the story, there are vignettes from his notes, covering Robert Johnson, Itzikel Kramtweiss, the Yenkovitz and Goldberg Band, Sholom Aleichem reading from his own stories, and women cantors in recording sessions.

Sapoznik is intrigued by the cross-pollination of Yiddish-American culture. On one cut, Nellie Casman, of the Yiddish theater, was backed by Larry Shield, whose band played on hundreds of Yiddish and cantorial sessions. He also composed and conducted the movie scores for “Our Gang” and Laurel and Hardy.“

"How many hundreds of thousands of people have heard those scores?” asked Sapoznik. And yet “we can hear the same influence that he brought to those movies in this orchestration for Yiddish theater.”Sapoznik observed, “The cantorial tradition,” so central to Yiddish recordings, “was the key DNA of Eastern European Jewish music. Everything — klezmer, Yiddish theater, folk songs — that’s what links them all together. And yet every one of those other musical traditions has experienced a revival except the cantorial.”

In the story, Sapoznik hopes that as many as 8,000 other Yiddish recordings will be digitally remastered and available online "in the next year or so."

As Tracing the Tribe has often written in its posts on the Florida Atlantic University Jewish Music Archives and the Beit Hatfutsot music archives collection in Tel Aviv, Yiddish music recording stopped soon after WWII. American Jews lost the Yiddish of their parents and grandparents and, in Europe, six million Jews (most of them Yiddish speakers) had been lost.

Thus ended the heyday of Yiddish theater and radio. With the creation of the state of Israel, Hebrew became more important than Yiddish.

But, as the world turns, everything old becomes new again, and there are those individuals, such as at Living Art, who are the hold-outs for a new generation and who are preserving their expertise through organizing Yiddish festivals and making recordings, such as the Mayrent Collection, available.

For more information on Yiddish music collections, which have been preserved through donations of old records, search through Tracing the Tribe's archives, using "Jewish Music" or "Yiddish Music."

Have you inherited a collection and you don't know what to do with it? Are you now helping an elderly relative clean out their home? Don't simply throw out those recordings and sheet music. Contact an archive and donate the material so that it will be preserved for the future.

Book: Yiddish Given Names

Rella Israly Cohn's "Yiddish Given Names" (Scarecrow Press, 2008) is a new one for Tracing the Tribe. The work, based on the author's dissertation, was mentioned recently on the Jewish librarians' discussion list.


It offers 256 given names used in the modern period (since 1750).

Patrick J. Stevens, selector for Jewish Studies, at Cornell University Library, wrote about the book:

The book, although not inexpensive, is highly worth recommending as a learned and deeply interesting reference source and discussion of Yiddish names, and by extension, of Ashkenazi Jewish naming practices and Yiddish historical linguistics. Chapters preceding the lexicon itself review not only the data fields for the names analyzed, but also the literature on the topic, the history of Yiddish ("Earliest Yiddish" appears to have arisen around 1000 CE) and Ashkenazi Jewish naming (contrasted with Sephardic practices).

According to Stevens, a World CAT search shows that it is available in 67 libraries.


It seems like it would be useful for genealogists researching their Ashkenazi roots, and the information contrasting Ashkenazi and Sephardi naming practices would be useful as well.


Keep an eye out for it.

Yiddish: Got a summer or a year?

Our family lost Yiddish and Russian back in 1905 when great-grandma told her kids, upon arrival in Newark NJ, that they were Americans and must only speak English from then on.

Of course, she herself never did!

Yiddish - the Russian disappeared almost immediately - lasted for another complete generation of fluent speakers, and an additional generation of those who understood but could not speak. And then there was the third generation, who knew a handful of words, generally used in the right context. The fourth generation seems to know only those words connected to food or used in Jewish jokes.

I don't remember ever having a full conversation with Little or White Grandma (who was petite and had white hair, so as to distinguish her from the Big Grandma on the other side - whom I don't remember). Our words were always translated by some intermediary.

If you are in the same boat, or your children or grandchildren are showing an interest, here are two programs that might keep Yiddish alive in your family.

The National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts is offering a seven-week Steiner Summer Internship Program (June 6-July 23, 2010). No prior Yiddish knowledge is required for the program which includes intensive Yiddish classes (three hours daily) for beginners and intermediates, studies in Yiddish culture and Eastern European history, distinguished international faculty, free tuition and credit for two undergraduate courses, research opportunities; field trips, workshops, performances, and more.

Full-time undergrad and grad students are encouraged to apply here by February 1, 2010.

And, if you have an academic year (September-June) to devote to keeping language alive, there is the Graduate Fellows Program, a full-time Yiddish academic year practicum. This one requires a basic knowledge of Yiddish, a BA in Jewish Studies/equivalent.

Those accepted will work on new and ongoing projects in: Yiddish bibliography, exhibitions, ethnography, oral history, education, website, publications and more; enjoy hands-on learning with the Book Center's senior staff; and receive $20,000 stipend for the nine-month program plus health insurance.

Click here to apply, with the deadline also February 1, 2010.

What about a similar program for Ladino?

Jerusalem: Yiddish Conference, Dec. 7-10

An international conference will examine Yiddish language and culture over the past century, representing a 700-year linguistic and cultural tradition.

Following the Holocaust, when millions of European Yiddish speakers were murdered and educational/cultural institutions were destroyed, the conference will investigate what happened to Yiddish and how it survived.

"Jerusalem Conference: A Century of Yiddish 1908-2008" will be held December 7-10, 2009, at Hebrew University's Givat Ram campus, sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Studies at Hebrew University, Israel Science Foundation and Israel National Commission for UNESCO.

The four-day conference is open to the public and will features more than 30 short lectures, followed by Q&As in 12 sessions arranged in categories.

Topics (see the program link for complete details) will include talks mostly in Hebrew and Yiddish, with a few in English. The main categories are:

- Modern Yiddish literature
- International Yiddish press
- Yiddish theater and poetry
- Yiddish cultural history and creativity during the Holocaust
- Postwar revival of Yiddish language and literature
- Yiddish education in the Diaspora and in Israel
- Yiddish in academic institutions
- Significance of Yiddish and its culture for Jewish Studies

Conference topics range from Yiddish culture as self-identity, status of Yiddish following the relocation of millions of Yiddish speakers and their descendants to Israel and the Diaspora, as well as the impact of the Internet.

Literary and theatrical events will include Yiddish monologues and dialogues written by some of the best modern Yiddish authors and three generations of Yiddish poets reading contemporary Yiddish poetry.

A book fair will be held for Yiddish books, translations and Eastern European Jewish literature.

The last two generations have seen a growing interest in Yiddish language and culture despite the sharp decrease in the number of its speakers. This increased interest has developed in a rapidly changing society in which new media – particularly the Internet – are powerful forces.

Entering the word “Yiddish” in the Google search engine to check the extent of interest in Yiddish in the world presents some 10 million hits. This is tangible evidence that Yiddish is embedded in the real world and testifies to the widespread interest in Yiddish today.

Teaching Yiddish in Jewish school systems around the world is an important topic. It is taught at most Israeli universities, as well as in Europe and North America. Summer courses are offered in Vilna (Vilnius), New York, Tel-Aviv, Birobidzhan, Paris, Oxford, Warsaw, Toronto, California, Strasbourg and elsewhere, with non-Jewish students an important percentage of attendees.

For more information, click the link above.

Yiddish: Register for this online class

Want to learn mamaloshen (Yiddish)? No time during the day? No place to take it near home?

Here's the solution: an online Yiddish class which you can do from home no matter where in the world you live.

You can also receive optional academic credit from the University of Massachusetts, as you study with the National Yiddish Book Center's faculty and explore Yiddish culture through literature, film, theater and music.

The course is for students who wish to explore the language and culture of Ashkenazic Jewry. There are no prerequisites, and no knowledge of any Jewish language or the Jewish alphabet is expected. Over the course of the semester, students will learn to read, write, and converse in Yiddish and will be introduced to a number of Yiddish songs, poems, and folktales. By the end of the term, students should be able to converse in Yiddish on a variety of topics and to read simple Yiddish texts.

Online registration is now open for this new class.

Yiddish has been spoken by most European Ashkenazi Jews for nearly 1,000 years. It went from the Rhineland (today's Germany) east to Slavic lands, and then went along for the ride with immigrants who resettled in the Americas, Australia, South Africa and elsewhere.

According to the Center:

This course will give students an opportunity to experience the richness of Yiddish literature—and Yiddish humor—in the original; to learn about the Hasidic world through tales and songs; and to speak, write, and read in Yiddish while exploring American and East European Yiddish literature, film, theater and klezmer music.

Instructor Yuri Vedenyapin is the academic director of the National Yiddish Book Center's Summer Yiddish Program.

He teaches Yiddish language and culture at Harvard University, and his interests include old and modern Yiddish literature, Eastern European Jewish folklore, the history of Yiddish dialects and literary standards, as well as ethnographic fieldwork. He's conducted interviews with Yiddish writers, actors, and members of Hasidic communities.

With a BA (Harvard University) and MA (Columbia University), he has also taught Yiddish at Columbia University, Moscow State University, and the Yiddish Summer Program in Warsaw, Poland. Additionally, he also performs in Yiddish, Russian and Polish.

Click here for more information and to register for the class (for academic credit or not). The cost isn't unexpensive ($600, or $570 for National Yiddish Book Center members), but there are many advantages to learning online and the instructor is tops in his field. The class runs from September-December.

Israel: 19th century Hebrew help needed

Tracing the Tribe's readers are an esoteric bunch with unusual knowledge, so we are hoping that you can help with the following puzzles.

The Israel Genealogical Society (IGS), in conjunction with London's Montefiore Endowment, is transcribing, translating and digitizing the five 19th century Jewish population censuses (1839, 1849, 1855, 1866 and 1875) conducted in Eretz Israel, commissioned by Sir Moses Montefiore.

Data fields include head of household names, ages, birthplace, names/ages of wives and children, property/financial standing, occupation and diverse comments.

Every adult and child mentioned in the census, even if listed without a name, is listed individually in the database. In the case of children, the names of the parents, when available, were added to the child's listing. The term orphan is used when the father has passed away but not necessarily the mother. In most instances orphans were listed separately, which can be somewhat misleading as it does not always allow a connection to be found between the orphan and the mother who is listed in a separate list of widows.

Sephardic community members generally have surnames, while few Ashkenazim do. To make it easier to enable a search engine, extra fields were added to the database for father's name, mother's name and husband's name instead of merely including that in the "comments" field.

Not all details are given for each record, but the available information will be extremely valuable to researchers, historians and sociologists. For more information, click here for extensive information on the project, data field descriptions, and links to two completed databases (1839-40) and their statistics.

The completed, searchable database will be in Hebrew and English.

Although handwritten in Hebrew, the records also contain many words of Yiddish, Arabic and other languages.

Currently, the group is translating the 1855 census and have discovered some words and abbreviations that have defied translation.

1. talal trevlier (Hebrew letters: tet aleph lamed aleph lamed - tet resh ayin vav vav lamed yod ayin resh). This phrase appeared four times, twice with only the first word, once for a widow, and as an occupation in the Hassidim Vollin Kollel.

We think it is Yiddish, possibly of Arabic and/or French origin. None of our Yiddish speakers recognize the words, although some suggested that the second word may be traveller. The birthplaces of the people involved include Tysmenytsya and Rzeszow.

2. p"ch (peh chet). This abbreviation refers to a Rabbi Yitzchak from Vilna and his son and granddaughter. They were from Jerusalem's Prushim Kollel.

The son and granddaughter were listed as descendants of Rabbi Yitzchak P"ch (PACH?), and his son wanted to learn his father's craft. The Rabbi's listing did not include a surname. Rather, p"ch was listed as his occupation. The question: What is P"ch? Is it a surname, or an occupation abbreviation (and if so, for what)?

All ideas and suggestions will be appreciated IGS census project coordinator Billie Stein.

National Yiddish Book Center - June newsletter

I've mentioned that I attended summer music camp at the University of Massachusetts, in Amherst, back in junior high school when our mascot was a pterodactyl.

That's when I discovered the joys of a well-stocked campus book store, reading up on Jewish history, the Sephardic experience and much more. I spent all my money - such as it was - on books. Those were great summers I won't forget - Amherst was a great place.

These days, Amherst is also home to Aaron Lansky's National Yiddish Book Center.

On June 2, the entire Yiddish book collection was transported to the new Kaplen Family Building. From a Holyoke warehouse to their new high-tech secure home, took 12 hours, 12 miles and 16 truckloads! This week, they began unpacking more than 4,600 boxes of books and shelving them. Read more about The Great Shlepenish.

If you are in the area this summer, there's the Paper Bridge Summer Arts Festival (July 12-16) offering Jewish film, music and dance events.

And who can forget that great Yiddish writer - Vilyam Shekspir - and his sonetn? Do you remember his immortal words: Zol ikh farglaykhn dikh tsum zumer-tog? (Shall I compare thee to a Summer's Day?)

Shakespeare fascinated many Yiddish translators and the plays were published in Yiddish, including an alleged Polish Yiddish King Lear that included the claim fartaytsht un farbesert ("translated and improved") on the title page.

The NYBC has two translations of his Sonnets by Berl Lapin and Abraham Asen. View or download them from the Digital Yiddish Library.

Lapin's bilingual edition is here. He also translated William Blake, Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost. Asen's is here; he also translated Whitman, Tennyson, Byron, The Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayyam and Shakespeare's King Lear.

Discovery Project - Edward Kagansky

Edward Kagansky was born in a small village near Kishinev, Moldova in 1952. As a child, Kagansky longed to play the piano, but his father couldn't afford one. Instead, he came home one day with a small suitcase containing a beautiful miniature accordion. Soon Edward was playing with local Roma musicians. By the time he reached his early twenties he was learning the klezmer repertoire while traversing the Moldavian countryside with an octogenarian badkhn (folk poet and wedding entertainer) who went by the name of Nakhes (fulfillment).

Learn more about Kagansky and hear him play here.

Great Yiddish book migration to begin

The National Yiddish Book Center (Amherst, Massachusetts) is almost ready to begin its "Great Shlepenish," as president Aaron Lansky calls it.

His efforts have been widely written about and called "the greatest cultural rescue effort in Jewish history."

The NYBC, founded in 1980, is supported by more than 30,000 members. It is the largest and fastest-growing Jewish cultural organization in the US, and has preserved some 1.5 million Yiddish works and other modern Jewish literature with the assistance of many volunteers.

Six workers and a supervisor will take six weeks - hopefully to finish by mid-July - to move the holdings into a new secure, fireproof and climate-controlled library in the Kaplen Famly Building.

The goal of the Shlepenish is the physical and informational transfer of thousands upon thousands of Jewish texts, periodicals, and other items such as sheet music from its current location at a factory space in Holyoke to the Center's newly constructed state-of-the-art library annex at the primary Hampshire College site, whose design was modeled after Harvard's long term book storage facility and features "an airlock entrance, gasketed doors, geothermal energy and precise computer-controlled temperature and humidity"—theoretically sufficient to preserve books for 300 years or more.

The Center is asking for tax-deductible donations to help finance the expensive move - about $74,000. Donations received in excess of the goal will be used to fund innovative bibliographic and educational programs. Visit the NYBC site to contribute.

The NYBC includes sound and video collections, and the Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library (founded 1998) which digitizes titles and makes available high-quality reprints.

Read more here, or click on the NYBC link above.

Philly 2009: Yiddish, preservation, food sessions added

Two workshops and a Yiddish session have been added to the Friday morning line-up at the 29th IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy (Sunday-Friday, August 2-7, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania).

To see the new additions, click the Philly 2009 website for the program and all conference details.

Tours and the Film Festival schedule will soon be added. Tracing the Tribe will let you know when those are available.

The session with Rabbi Ilene Schneider - "Yiddish: A Fun Look at the Language of our Ancestors" - is sure to be great. She's the author of the recently published "Talk Dirty Yiddish: Beyond Drek." I recently received a copy of her very funny book and will review it in Tracing the Tribe.

The new Friday hand's-on workshops (added fee) are:

- "Preserving Documents and Photographs," a workshop with preservation services director Laura Hortz Stanton and preservation services officer Kim Andrews, of the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts. Friday, August 7, from 8.15-10.15am, $10.

- "Tasting World Jewish Cuisines: Turkish, Syrian, and Ashkenazi-Italkeni Recipes." with cookbook authors Sheilah Kaufman and Aliza Green. Friday, August 7, 10.30-12.30am $20.

Trying to figure out which sessions to attend during this very busy week?

Download the updated Conference Program. Go to the program page, and click "HERE" near the top of the page for the PDF format. There is an alternative program which illustrates a session time and its related subject or track. Rooms are not yet added.

If you have already registered and want to add sessions, click here. Remember to sign up for the SIG luncheons, which fill to capacity very quickly. Also check out the computer workshops. Don't be disappointed!

If you have not yet registered, go to the conference site and look on the left sidebar for "Registration."

Museum of Family History: New material

Museum of Family History founder Steve Lasky's visit to the 12th annual International Association of Yiddish Clubs conference (La Jolla, California) where he recorded more than 12 lectures, the first lecture is available here: "Growing Up in Czernowitz," by Dr. Julius Scherzer.

Two new video previews - "Return to Ozarow: Mending a Broken Link," and "L'affaire Grynszpan" (this one in French) - are here.

Steve has added a new section - "Yiddish Vinkl Bookstore" - where visitors will be able to both read and hear works by famous authors. Currently, there are two short poems, written and spoken in Yiddish, by Peretz Miransky, a member of the Yung Vilne literary group. See them here. On the same page, read about a Yiddish theatre book by Joel Schechter and a 1940s book of poems by Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger of Czernowitz.

The final chapters of the Maurice Schwartz biography - "Once a Kingdom" - is now available here.

View a grounds map for Washington Cemetery (Monmouth Junction, New Jersey) and Dalton Cemetery (Scranton, Pennsylvania). Map page links can be seen under Cemetery Project on the Site Map page.

A new project will memorialize the Jews of Szczekociny, Poland. Steve reports that he already has information on cemetery restorations in Losice and Wachock, Poland, the reopening of Warsaw's B'nai B'rith Lodge, the Lodz Ghetto Liquidation 60th anniversary commemoration, and the future Vilnius Jewish library of Vilnius.

Whenever you check out the museum's site, look at Recent Updates and 2008 Updates for information as Steve adds it online. Those links are found on the Site Map page.