Read all the Forward’s news stories in one place
Read all the Forward’s news stories in one place
Read all the Forward’s news stories in one place
Read all the Forward’s news stories in one place
In a brightly lit classroom, decorated with colorful posters and Hebrew lettering, the 24 second grade schoolgirls, dressed in crisp blue uniforms, listened as the young, modestly attired teacher reviewed the Genesis chapter in which God commands Abraham to leave his homeland. “Vayomer — who knows the meaning of the word vayomer?” the teacher asked…
Warsaw, Poland – After one of the largest Jewish cemeteries in Poland was vandalized last week, the chief rabbi of Poland found an unexpected source of help for the clean-up: 20 Polish art students and the mayor of the town himself, all of whom helped scrub the 100 gravestones spray-painted with black swastikas. The incident,…
Krakow, Poland – About 13,000 people crowded the main square in the cobblestone-paved former Jewish quarter of Krakow last week for the finale of this year’s Jewish Culture Festival. The event — which is funded by the Polish government, the city of Krakow, the Friends of the Krakow Jewish Culture Festival in New York and…
On a chilly Monday evening in January, Yugntruf, a New York-based not-for-profit designed to promote Yiddish, assembled a panel to address the question “What Attracts Us to Yiddish?” Mostly in Yiddish, but with occasional forays into English for the benefit of the uninitiated, the evening’s seven panelists gamely tackled the question with a range of…
Back in 1906, when he was 15, Benny Swartzberg could not have foreseen that, a century later, his growing collection of postcards would provide the raw material for an online store managed by his grandson. But today, Swartzberg’s grandson Steven Weiss has turned that collection into an unusual shop, selling such merchandise as journals covered…
Last month’s publication of “The Cross and Other Jewish Stories” by Ukrainian-born Yiddish author Lamed Shapiro marks both a new beginning and the beginning of the end for the New Yiddish Library Series. “The Cross” is the seventh book of the series, a collaborative effort involving the Fund for the Translation of Jewish Literature, the…
A new Yiddish course is debuting in an unexpected place: Bangkok. The Goethe Institute in the Thai capital is offering Yiddish for the first time to graduates of its advanced German-language program, most of whom are Thai Buddhists. The class, which is being conducted in German and Yiddish, will also teach the basics of Jewish…
Where can you find a lively venue these days in which more than a third of the attendees under the age of 30 are fluent Yiddish speakers? Every Thursday, from 10 p.m. until about 2:30 a.m., a group called Chulent meets on the third floor of the Millinery Centre Synagogue — an old building in…
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