yiddish berlin

I would want to write to someone
A love letter, a love letter…

(Celia Dropkin)

What gives the material for love letters? Tender declarations of one’s feelings, promises to be faithful until the end of the days, and gentle words of admiration. And also: desire, sexual hunger, bittersweet longing for a beloved body – and longing in general, and pain of unanswered love, jealousy, doubts, fears, – a sometimes grief for the love that is no more, and light sorrow about the past. In one word, the whole kaleidoscope of human feelings. Yiddish poets know a lot about it. 

So come to the poetry evening on February 13th to explore the nuances of love through the words of old and new Yiddish writing. 

You will hear texts by: Celia Dropkin, Uriel Weinreich, Anna Margolin, as well as contemporary Yiddish poets from Berlin.

Featuring writing by:

Luise Fakler, Katerina Kuznetsova, Daria Ma, Yael Merlini, Jordan Lee Schnee, Jake Schneider – and more! 

Music by Zhenja Oks

Introduction and moderation: Osian Evans Sharma and Michelle Bernstein

You can view the texts and translations here.

Admission is free. Donations are welcome.

13 February 2025. Doors open at 6 PM. Event starts at 6.30 PM.

Café Chagall
Kollwitzstraße 2
10405 Berlin (Prenzlberg)

Facebook event

15 Aug 2024 — 28 Aug 2024

Yiddish.Berlin presents:

Yevgeniy Fiks
NATO in Yiddishland

NATO in Yiddishland, an exhibition by Yevgeniy Fiks, satirizes and deconstructs the deadly pathos of fervent nationalism, patriotism, and militarism. It insists on the non-state concept of Yiddishland as an urgent alternative. Yiddishland does not claim land or territory. NATO in Yiddishland reflects on the artificiality of national divisions from the standpoint of Yiddish culture and Ashkenazic civilization in Europe, and demands diasporism, cosmopolitanism, hyphenated identities, and multilingualism.

***

This exhibition also marks Yiddish.Berlin’s 5-year anniversary. During this time, many people have invested their idealism, creativity, and priceless unpaid labor into cultivating the fertile ground on which a new Yiddish community has been growing in Berlin. Due to a last-minute loss of expected funding, we have now put forward the money for this exhibition out of pocket, which we unfortunately cannot afford ourselves. Your donation would help pay for our two weeks´ rent at the gallery, installation costs, live performances and presentations at the events, and making sure that there is someone in the gallery every day who can explain the concept of “Yiddishland” to anyone who walks in off the street. A sheynem dank!

Donation via PayPal

[Yiddish.Berlin remains an independent group without a registered legal status. That is why we are collecting donations via a private account.]

Opening: Thurs, 15 Aug 2024, 7 pm
Attended by the artist Yevgeniy Fiks
Music: Zhenja Oks

Artist talk: Sun, 18 Aug 2024, 6 pm
With Yevgeniy Fiks, along with a visual retrospective on 5 years of Yiddish.Berlin by Arndt Beck

Close reading workshop: Sun, 25 Aug 2024, 5 pm
Pogroms in Soviet Yiddish poetry
With Katerina Kuznetsova

Finissage: Wed, 28 Aug 2024, 7 pm

Open daily from 4 to 6 pm
during the accompanying events
and by appointment.

Galerie Zeitzone
Adalbertstr. 79
10997 Berlin-Kreuzberg

Although Yiddish.Berlin has been less active lately as an official (or rather, very unofficial) group, Berlin’s decentralized, DIY Yiddish community is livelier than ever.

There is a whole series of major Yiddish-related events coming up in the city:

• 8 March – On International Women’s Day, Yiddish.Berlin presents works by Yiddish women poets, featuring a varied program of Yiddish poetry and music written, organized, and performed entirely by women.
• 13 April – PARATAXE Symposium XIV: Hebrew? Yiddish? Berlin? This symposium at the Kulturbrauerei will be devoted to literature written here in Berlin in Yiddish and Hebrew, past and present. The Yiddish scene is the focus of the 4pm panel and will also be represented with original poetry and music in the evening reading at 8pm.
• 14 April – Haus für Poesie: For you, whoever you are: Yiddish poetry. This reading, curated by Jordan Schnee, brings together the contemporary Yiddish poets David Omar Cohen (Amsterdam) and Beruriah Wiegand (London/Oxford) with music by Daniel Kahn (Hamburg) and text-based visual art by Ella Ponizovsky Bergelson (Berlin).
• 24-28 April – The 2024 Shtetl Berlin festival! Save the dates. More information on this annual whirlwind of Yiddish music and culture will be available soon on their website. Meanwhile, their next klezmer jam sessions at Oblomov will be happening on 13 March and 11 April, plus a Yiddish singalong on 27 March.

Apart from that, here are some updates on ongoing developments in the local Yiddish community:

• The Yiddish social club Shmues un Vayn was recently featured in the English section of the Forverts with an article headlined “You can now hear people speaking Yiddish in bars all over Berlin.” That might not be entirely true yet, but we’re well on the way as we approach our fiftieth gathering. The club’s gabbai Jake Schneider gave a workshop in January about how to start and maintain this kind of group, hosted by KlezCalifornia (recording  available on YouTube). He also gave a guest interview about it for the podcast Proste Yiddish in, well, simple Yiddish.
• A new Yiddish poetry writing group, coordinated by Katerina Kuznetsova, is now meeting every two weeks to discuss its members’ original Yiddish poems, which they have recently performed at the London-based Yiddish Open Mic Cafe, a reading organized by Leivik House in memory of Moyshe Dovid Guiser, and probably more.
• The longstanding weekly reading group, coordinated by Arndt Beck, remains devoted to our Berliner zeyde Avrom Nokhem Stencl. Besides reading his poems every Sunday, participants have also been translating Stencl’s poetry and prose into four languages.
• A new initiative is underway to create a mini-library of books in and about Yiddish called the Berliner Tshemodan-Bibliotekl (the Little Berlin Suitcase Library). After a spontaneous fundraising drive (you can still donate here), three of us traveled to Hamburg for a Yiddish book sale by the Salomo-Birnbaum-Gesellschaft. We did indeed return home with a suitcase full of Yiddish books. More information about the library soon.