Yiddish

Vilnius Yiddish Institute Summer Course Students Celebrate Sabbath at Lithuanian Jewish Community

Vilnius Yiddish Institute Summer Course Students Celebrate Sabbath at Lithuanian Jewish Community

As in earlier years, this year’s crop of Yiddish summer course students were invited to celebrate Sabbath at the Lithuanian Jewish Community. The event scheduled for the Friday of July 31 was joined by the Union of Lithuanian Jewish Students and became a potluck rather than a hosted dinner.

A Lithuanian girl named Aistė served as greeter and hostess, directing people with dishes, tupperware and bottles of wine to the tables in front of the stage in the White Hall on the third floor of the Community building. Aistė said she was taking the summer course even though she had no Jewish heritage at all in her family, but is simply fascinated with the language and culture of Yiddish. There was some confusion as to the scheduled start of the evening, either 8:30 P.M. or 9, but in the end that lent to the informality of the evening.

The traditional Sabbath blessing was given by VYI summer course teacher professor Abraham  Lichtenbaum from Argentina with program head professor Dov-Ber Kerler lending assistance, after which the traditional challa bread was broken and passed around.

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Dita Shperling: Germans Did Not Distinguish Lithuanians from Jews

“During the first days of the war the Germans who came to Kaunas couldn’t tell the difference between Jews and Lithuanians, but Lithuanians helped them to do,” Kaunas ghetto prisoner Dita Shperling recalled, citing the words of the German soldiers themselves.

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Dita (Yehudit) Schperling and her husband Yuda Zupowitch

Dita Schperling tries to travel every summer to Vilnius from Israel where she lives. She agreed to discuss her experience in the ghetto with staff from the LJC webpage.

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When Zalmen Reyzen’s Vilna Yiddish Newspaper Headlined an Evening for the Yiddish Writer A.I. Grodzenski

When Zalmen Reyzen’s Vilna Yiddish Newspaper Headlined an Evening for the Yiddish Writer A.I. Grodzenski

by Dovid Katz
 

A 1922 headline in Zalmen Reyzen’s daily newspaper, the Vilna “Tog” (“Day” —  issue of 17 Jan. 1922) announced a Saturday night event dedicated to the remarkable Vilna Yiddish writer Aaron Isaac (Arn-Yitskhok) Grodzenski (1891-1941), a secular Yiddish writer who was the nephew of the world famous rabbi Chaim-Oyzer Grodzenski (whose onetime home on Pylimo [Yiddish: Zaválne gas] still attracts visitors from around the world). Zalmen Reyzen, a famous Yiddish philologist, literary historian and editor, a co-founder of the Vilna Yivo in 1925, himself lived on Greys Pohulánke (now Basanavičiaus, where a bilingual Yiddish-Lithuanian plaque marks the site at no. 17).

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Keepsakes of Old Jewish Vilna (16)

Dovid Katz’s new article (in Yiddish) on the differing Jewish names for the city Vilnius, and the cultural origin and background of each, has just appeared in connection with an old bookbinder’s ‘spine stuffing card’ made from title pages containing all three Jewish traditional names. The article points out that Vilna Jewish books started using a fourth name for the city in the final pre-Holocaust years.

The article, whose Yiddish title translates “Vilno, Vilne, Vilna — the three together in a Vilna bookbinder’s hands: three (factually four) names for the city used by its own Jewish residents”
is at:

Keepsakes of Old Jewish Vilna (16)

Yiddish Reading Circle Returns

Yiddish Reading Circle Returns

On March 12, 2015 the Yiddish Reading Circle conducted by world-renowned Yiddishist Dovid Katz returned to the large hall on the second floor of the Lithuanian Jewish Community building in Vilnius.

 Dovid Katz, who was a professor of Yiddish at Vilnius University for 11 years, has been conducting the informal circle off and on for lovers and native speakers of Yiddish for several years now, as his schedule allows.

The first class in the current round of readings began in the traditional manner with those in attendance giving their names and place of origin in Yiddish to the best of their ability.

This was followed by the also-traditional reading of a short text in Yiddish by volunteers around the table. Dr. Katz offered help when needed and punctuated the reading with explanations of general and more obscure aspects of the language.

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YIDDISH LANGUAGE PROGRAM RESUMING AT THE JEWISH COMMUNITY!

YIDDISH LANGUAGE PROGRAM RESUMING AT THE JEWISH COMMUNITY!

THURSDAYS 3 PM (1500), STARTING 12 MARCH 2015
The 16th annual cycle of the Vilna Yiddish Reading Circle (which doubles as an intermediate-level class) starts next Thursday March 12th 3 PM sharp (1500) at the Jewish Community of Lithuania, Pylimo 4, Vilnius, upstairs seminar room.
Everyone welcome, admission free. Only Yiddish is spoken, but non-speakers are always invited to come and listen (hearing Yiddish is good for your health!). The project is carried forward in memory of three of its stalwarts of the first decade and a half: Dr. Sheine Sideraite, Dr. Izraelis Lempertas (Yisroel Lempert) and Mr. Meilach Stalevich.
The program is led by Dr. Dovid Katz, who founded it at the Jewish Community in September 1999, and was professor at Vilnius University from 1999 to 2010, after many years of teaching at Oxford and a stint at Yale (information on his works in Yiddish studies at: www.dovidkatz.net).
Additional classes and seminars may be added in due course.
EVERYBODY WELCOME!
Yiddish mini-museum of old Jewish Vilna

Yiddish mini-museum of old Jewish Vilna

Latest addition to our Yiddish mini-museum of old Jewish Vilna (50th artefact): an advertisement from 8 August 1919 inviting parents to enroll their children in the Hebrew high school at Zaválne 4 (the gymnasium founded by Dr. L. Epstein in 1915). That is the building we all know here today as Pylimo 4, headquarters of the Jewish Community of Lithuania Lietuvos žydų bendruomenė). At that particular stage of the Hebrew movement in Vilna, the street name retained its final Yiddish shewa vowel (later to be hebraicized to -a).

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