Grapevine August 18, 2024: Preserving and promoting Yiddish

■ WHILE ISRAEL has several organizations dedicated to the preservation and promotion of Jewish culture, including the Jewish languages Ladino and Yiddish, the most veteran and most important Yiddish organizations are headquartered in the United States. 

The Workmens’ Circle, founded on September 4, 1900; YIVO, the Institute for Jewish Research, founded as the Yiddish Scientific Institute in Lithuania, in 1925, and transferred to New York City in 1940; and the Congress for Jewish Culture, founded in NYC in 1948. 

The Workmen’s Circle started as a mutual aid society which over time became politically and culturally active, promoting cross-generation social and cultural programs, and social and economic justice.

YIVO, which has partnered with the Center for Jewish History, has the largest and most comprehensive collection of Jewish cultural creativity in Eastern Europe, with more than 24 million items, including music,  literature, theater, and art and film collections, as well as personal records, photographs, manuscripts, diaries, personal correspondence and more. 

In addition, YIVO publishes Yiddish language books, and periodicals, and conducts 40-50 programs each year that include lectures, conferences, and concerts featuring award-winning scholars, writers, performers, and artists from all over the Jewish world.

The Congress for Jewish Culture initially operated in New York, Buenos Aires, and Paris. However, an ever-shrinking budget forced the Buenos Aires and Paris offices to close, and the New York office has only one paid employee, CEO Shane Baker. Everyone else works on a voluntary basis.

Among its activities, the Congress for Jewish Culture holds an annual memorial tribute to the Soviet Yiddish writers who were murdered on August 12, 1952. Such events are held in conjunction with other Yiddish organizations. The most recent was held last week.

Coming up at YIVO on Wednesday, September 4, at 7 p.m. EST (and live-streamed on Zoom) is the American debut of The Bashevis Singers from Melbourne, Australia. Their name is borrowed from the name of famous Yiddish author and Nobel Prize literature laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer. The Bashevis Singers are the children of generations of people who lived their lives in Yiddish. The sibling-cousin trio is composed of Evie Gawenda, an award-winning theater director and singer, Husky Gawenda, and Gideon Preiss, who are also the core members of the critically acclaimed indie-folk band Husky. The four albums of The Bashevis Singers span centuries of Yiddish poetry and song and have brought to life classic 20th-century folk songs, new compositions based on mystical poetry penned by legendary Yiddish poets, and original songs written in collaboration with their father and uncle, celebrated journalist and author Michael Gawenda.

“We can’t wait for our New York debut,” the Bashevis Singers stated. “We’ve been singing in Yiddish since we were kids. We were brought up on the great Yiddish folk songs sung to us by our grandparents. But singing in Yiddish is not just a way of accessing a vanishing world, it’s also our way of accessing a Yiddish present and future. In the creation of new work, the language lives and breathes and sings.”

Visitors to New York who want to attend the concert in person should go to YIVO in the Center for Jewish History Building on 15 West 16th Street. Reservations can be made at yivo.org/The-Bashevis-Singers. The concert is free of charge and is sponsored by The Kronhill Pletka Foundation with additional generous support from YiddishSongsOnline.com, and in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

Many long years ago, when the writer of this column first visited Paris, she was taken by the famous miniaturist Devi Tuszynski to the Pletzel, a meeting place for Jewish culture that was frequented by Yiddish writers who were all Holocaust survivors. They were surprised to meet a young woman from the far-flung island continent who could converse with them in Yiddish. They were apparently unaware that on a per capita basis, Australia had one of the largest Holocaust survivor communities in the world – and most of them spoke Yiddish which was more or less the lingua franca of the Jewish community, alongside Polish.

Passing the torch 

■ BY SHEER coincidence, Yadin Antebi the new CEO of Bank Hapoalim, took office in the week of the 80th anniversary of the passing of Berl Katznelson, one of the most famous of the bank’s founders, who also founded the Am Oved publishing house, and is best known as one of the intellectual founders of Labor Zionism.

Israel's Joan of Arc

■ WILL HISTORY record Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara as the Israeli Joan of Arc? Admittedly, there is a huge age gap. Baharav-Miara will celebrate her 65th birthday next month, while Joan of Arc was only 19 when she was burned at the stake. In addition, Baharav-Miara was born in 1959, and Joan of Arc in 1412. Nevertheless, there are similarities between the two. Of course, it’s difficult to know whether any of the images of Joan of Arc actually captured her likeness, but they all illustrate her as having large, clear eyes and a determined expression, a high forehead, and full lips. Baharav-Miara can be similarly described – though the shape of their noses differs slightly. Joan of Arc led an army at a time when women had little status and put King Charles VII back on the throne. But afterward, when captured by the English army with the help of French collaborators, she was executed in the cruelest possible way, and the king did nothing to help her.

Baharav-Miara has, on several occasions, saved the prime minister from making horrendous mistakes, some of which were legally questionable and others plain embarrassing. But Netanyahu does not appreciate her integrity nor do most of the members of his coalition, who all want to get rid of her. So far, she has managed to stand her ground despite the brutal insults that have been hurled at her. 

Turning the other cheek

■ FORMER US president Donald Trump boycotted the inauguration of his successor, Joe Biden. But Biden has been reported as saying that if Trump succeeds in defeating Kamala Harris in his run for a return to the White House, he will attend Trump’s inauguration “because I have good manners.”  

However, if Harris wins, there are likely to be quite a few historic changes in Washington. For one thing, she will be the first woman president. Although she would not be the first Black person to sit behind the desk in the Oval Office, she would be the first Black female president – and her husband, Doug Emhoff, would not only be the first-ever “first gentleman,” he would also be the first Jewish White House consort. If that were to happen, there would be yet another historic first in that Emhoff would affix a mezuzah to the doorpost at the entrance to the White House. The mezuzah that he put up at the entrance to the vice president’s residence when he and Harris moved in was also a historic first. Emhoff, raised in Brooklyn by Jewish parents, is the grandson of Polish immigrants and has been acting as Biden’s unofficial advisor on antisemitism. He has never concealed nor downplayed his Jewish identity, though he has been more forthcoming about it since October 7. He and his wife are among those couples who accept each other’s ethnic and religious differences without trying to influence their spouses to convert.

AS A boy at yeshiva in Australia, Manny Waks, who now lives in Israel, was sexually abused by two of the yeshiva’s employees. One has already been convicted and the other has been ordered by the Magistrates Court to stand trial in the Country Court of Victoria on September 12, following a committal hearing last week. The second perpetrator, who moved to New York in the mid-1990s, was extradited last year and has been back in Australia since July last year. Waks flew back to Melbourne to be cross-examined by the defendant’s defense team, led by Ian Hill KC, who represented Malka Leifer and lost. Determined to get justice for himself and other boys who had been molested, Waks lifted the lid on such abuses in religious schools and elsewhere in Australia, which led to the establishment, in November 2012, of a Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse that resulted in wide and prolonged media coverage and far greater awareness of the extent to which minors had been silent victims.

Waks was one of seven former students of the yeshiva who were called to testify last week. He wasn’t looking for revenge. All he ever wanted was justice, he said. He was present at Malka Leifer’s trial for sexually abusing her students and then fleeing from Melbourne to Israel after the incidents became public. Both cases dragged on for years, and in the interim, Waks has established organizations with the goal of protecting children from sexual predators. 

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