Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Forverts in English

Popular Tel Aviv organization, “Yung Yidish”, forced to shut by December 5

According to a verdict by the Tel Aviv Local Affairs Court, the popular Yiddish cultural center and library,”Yung Yidish”, located inside the Tel Aviv Central Bus Station, will be forced to close its doors by December 5, 2021.

The eviction is part of a grand plan by the city to shut down the huge station due to its lack of fire safety standards and build a new one in another location in the city. For years local residents have complained about the high level of air and noise pollution at the foul-smelling station – a hulking seven-floor labyrinth, for years described as “a thorn in our eyes” and “a monstrosity”.

But when you climb up to the fifth floor of the complex and enter the space inhabited by “Yung Yidish”, it’s like entering another world: an impressive library of thousands of Yiddish books, begging to be leafed through. And if you’re lucky, you’ll come just in time to participate in one of their many activities: klezmer concerts, lectures, holiday celebrations and Yiddish courses, all under the direction of actor-singer Mendy Cahan, whose warmth and charisma strike you as soon as you enter.

mendy

The director of Yung Yidish, Mendy Cahan Image by Eldad Rafaeli

Itzik Gottesman, a senior lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin, who interviewed Cahan in 2009, praises one of Cahan’s greatest achievements, something no other Yiddish organization has managed to do: drawing in young Israelis.

“His space in the central bus station looks surrealistic from the outside, but as soon as you enter, you feel like you’re at home, among friends,” Gottesman said.

The Tel Aviv court had already ordered all businesses and cultural groups located in the central bus station to evacuate in 2016, unless Nitsba Real Estate, the company owning the station, obtained approval from Fire and Rescue Services, the Health Ministry and the Environmental Protection Ministry – something that everyone agrees is virtually impossible.

Trying to “sell” the moving plan to the public, Transportation Minister Merav Michaeli listed all the advantages. “In the near future we will see alternative sites, more electric buses, better service and less of the Tel Aviv central bus station and its pollution,” she said in a statement.

She did not specify whether the building will be leveled, an act certain to create even more air pollution in the city, or the fact that the new location, near the Panorama Center, lies far from a train station or main highway. As a result, buses would need to weave their way through the streets of Tel Aviv in order to reach its last stop, substantially increasing the passengers’ traveling time.

When Cahan first heard the news about the December 5 shutting of the bus station, he wasn’t worried. “We’ve heard that before,” he said during an interview with the Forverts. “But a couple of hours later, after I called some journalists and some of my friends, it turned out that it was worse than I thought.”

Because the ongoing feud has been between Nitsba and the municipality, or as Cahan calls it, “a dispute between capitalists”, no agency has bothered to approach the managers of the mom and pop shops housed in the bus station, or to the cultural centers like Yung Yidish, to see if they could come up with some solution. “No one has ever had any interest in culture here, and now – even less,” Cahan said.

What’s even more frustrating, Cahan added, is that this past year, during the pandemic, he and his assistants had finally expanded the bookshelves, enabling them to put thousands more of the books they had collected from residents of the city on display. “Next month, they’ll all have to be packed back into the boxes.”

Yung Yidish isn’t the only organization in Israel hosting Yiddish cultural events. There’s also the Yiddish theater, Yidishpiel, Yiddish courses at “Beit Sholem Aleichem” and in the universities, scholars researching the different fields related to the Yiddish language and culture and informal Yiddish book clubs round the country.

But all the other, more eclectic aspects of Yiddish culture – cabarets, klezmer concerts, dance, storytelling, memoirs, film making, working with Israelis in their 20s and 30s – is what Yung Yidish is all about. That’s its biggest strength.

“The shutting of the bus station and the possibility that Yung Yidish will no longer have its own space is something we cannot allow,” said Bella Bryks, a Yiddish activist in Tel Aviv. “The National Authority for Yiddish Culture helps Mendy but its budget is limited. It’s unfortunate that we have no Yiddish Book Center here in Israel, like they do in Amherst, Massachusetts,” she added.

“If the municipality is really going to shut and tear down the station, it has to find another space for Yung Yidish and help out with the transporting of the thousands of books it has,” Gottesman said. “Its library and the organization itself are national treasures.”

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rukhl Schaechter, Yiddish Editor

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.