[…] “It’s a dying language on the rise,” says Jeff Warschauer, a New Yorker who has led Yiddish singing workshops at the festival since the 1990s. This year he attracted a mix of English and Polish speakers, many of whom he says were not even Jewish. Festival attendees can sing Yiddish tunes by day, then dance to Yiddish tunes by night. Klezmer, the traditional music of Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews, is often referred to as Yiddish music. The Klezmatics (pictured), a Grammy Award-winning klezmer band, performed in Krakow.

The festival’s Yiddish focus echoes a larger phenomenon. American non-profits such as New York’s YIVO Institute for Jewish Research maintain significant Yiddish archives, offer educational programmes and fund international initiatives. Universities such as Oxford, Chicago and Columbia offer Yiddish as a foreign language. Summer Yiddish institutes take place in Vilnius, Warsaw, Tel Aviv, Paris, Brussels and several American cities.

“Many of the people who I taught Hebrew to in the early 2000s decided to continue their studies in Yiddish,” says Jonathan Ornstein, the executive director of the Jewish Community Centre (JCC) of Krakow, a native New Yorker now living in Poland. Anna Gulinska, the JCC’s director of programming, was one such student. She says the surge is not new, and that many people who were educated at these institutes are teaching and performing at events like the Jewish Culture Festival. More.

See: The Economist

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