YUNG Yidish WIEN

Itzik Gottesman and his daughter Esther Gottesman came to visit YUNG YiDiSH WIEN yesterday. He told me about his ongoing project to digitise recordings he made documenting over 30 years of Yiddish cultural life in the US. We also talked about the challenges and joys of running a cultural centre for Yiddish. It was great meeting in person finally!

45 years ago, the Holocaust Survivors Film Project, a grassroots New Haven community initiative that evolved into the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies started. A couple of weeks ago the first public exhibition 'In the First Person: The Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies' opened at the Yale University Library displaying 19 video excerpts along with books, pamphlets, manuscripts, posters, and other materials 'illuminating modern Jewish efforts to document anti-Jewish persecution through eyewitness accounts, starting from the Kishinev Pogrom of 1903 through the Holocaust and its aftermath'.
For instance, 'among the objects on view are the three volumes of “From the Last Extermination,” a 10-issue periodical published in Munich between 1946 and 1948 by the Jewish Historical Commission, which was founded by survivors. The journal, printed in Yiddish, contained eyewitness accounts, photographs, ghetto and camp songs, and historical analysis. The volumes bear the Yale University Library acquisition stamp from the year they were published, indicating that Yiddish-reading scholars in the United States had access to them.'

https://library.yale.edu/event/first-person-fortunoff-video-archive-holocaust-testimonies

https://news.yale.edu/2024/07/24/beinecke-exhibition-lifts-voices-holocaust-survivors?fbclid=IwY2xjawEljOJleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHSP6mW9Vk5XdwQ3kt4qVe-QhsCJ6Yhx-ArDXcISYmrfAa_DS-jQELFmWIw_aem_3SrZwishXhC-xzaOdFUKbg

Last week we had the first University of Vienna Hasidic Yiddish Summer School! We had 20 beginner students and 10 intermediate students. Many were University of Vienna students, some from other universities, and several others are Yiddish enthusiasts from Vienna and elsewhere.
In the morning Zoe Belk and Eidel Malowicki taught grammar and speaking, in the afternoons we listened to Eli Benedict, Mendy Cahan and Eidel Malowicki talk about different aspects of Hasidic history and culture.
The students were fantastic talmidim in our little summer yeshiva! Come again next year!

Or if you cannot wait so long, come to Yiddish Summer Weimar for our two-week course starting on Tuesday!

The beautiful photos are by the YYW volunteer photographer and film student, Anna Wurzer.

If you would like to hear the author of this book talk about the book at YUNG Yidish WIEN, come on 7 July!

ס׳איז אַרויס אויף ענגליש די זכרונות פֿון דער שרײַבערין רחל אױערבאַך װעגן דעם לעבן אין װאַרשעװער געטאָ. זי האָט געדינט ווי דער ראש פֿונעם געטאָס פֿאָלקסקיך און ווי אַ מיטאַרבעטער אויפֿן „עונג־שבת“־אַרכיוו. לייענט דעם אַרטיקל דאָ: bit.ly/45La6eM

The remarkable memoirs of the writer Rokhl Auerbach on life in the Warsaw Ghetto is now in English. Auerbach headed the ghetto's soup kitchen and was a member of the Oyneg Shabes archive project. Read the article here: bit.ly/45La6eM

We were so happy to have Zisl Slepovitch play for us yesterday! It was a great evening. Thank you all for coming!

An online academic concerence about Yiddish and Holocaust research co-organised by Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies and Tel Aviv University. You can read about the interesting details in the Forverts article , which also conatins the registration email!

A groundbreaking online conference seeks a role for Yiddish in the future of Holocaust studies. Topics include the songs of the Kovno ghetto; Yiddish drama after the Holocaust, and the challenges of translating Abraham Sutzkever’s poetry. Read the article here: bit.ly/4eIEsTl

On Thursday evening we had the pleasure to hear Sam Shuman (Shmilik Gavrilik) talk to us about Reb Shayele. It is often known that Reb Shayele's portrait is regularly hung in Hasidic households to ward off mice and other plagues, but as Sam explained to us, the cult that has been developing in recent years around Reb Shayele's personality goes way beyond that. His yortsayt in Bodrogkeresztúr-Keresztír is attended by over 30000 people. Sam argued persuasively that Reb Shayele has become nothing short of a Jewish equivalent of a patron saint, a concept that brings with it interesting complexities, which were discussed further in the question period. Sam showed us how the growing Hasidic cult around Reb Shayele brings into spotlight important questions about boundaries between private and public, a fundamental Jewish concept to begin with, and also the multi-layered and contradictory relationship between the Hasidic community and the State, let the latter be represented by an NYPD police officer or an institution of the Israel government.
We enjoyed very much this second lecture in the YUNG YiDiSH WIEN Contemporary Yiddish Culture Lectures series, and noted the similarities between Reb Shayele's role in contemporary Hasidism to that of Sarah Shnirer, as explained to us by Naomi Seidman in the first lecture in the series. This comparison brings up the issue of gender roles and Jewish masculinity and femininity, as, arguably, both personalities transgress their traditional gender roles. We are looking forward to the third lecture in the series, by Glenn Dynner on 6 June brought to us by the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies!

On Sunday it was LEBEDIK in YUNG YiDiSH WIEN! The ensemble with Sasha Lurje, Craig Judelman and Shaun Williams played a brand new program with music from the ethnically rich border region of the Carpathian Mountains. We heard Romanian shephard songs, Ruthenian dance music, Slovakian melodies, Ukrainian slow songs and even the Hungarian Szól a kakas már.. Some of the songs came down to us through testimonies of Holocaust survivors, recorded by the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, who was also the sponsor of the event. The fiddle, the accordion, the singing and the drums blended perfectly to create a rich world of Eastern European Jewish music from a region where Jews and many other ethnicities lived together for hundreds of years. Thank you LEBEDIK for evoking this world for an evening in today's Vienna!