Group photo of the Syndicalist Women´s League. Milly right in the background, with semi-covered face. Year and photographer unknown. Archive Klaus Decker.
In 1920s Berlin, Milly Witkop and Rudolf Rocker were at the center of many strands of the international and German anarcho-syndicalist movement. They were closely associated with Emma Goldman, Zenzl and Erich Mühsam. Milly was very involved in the Syndicalist Women’s League, whose inner-city Berlin group she led for a time. From 1926 onwards, she was secretary of the Berlin group of the International Workers’ Association’s relief committee for imprisoned anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists in Russia. In this lecture, we trace her commitment and let her speak for herself through her articles and appeals.
A lecture with reading by the FAU History and Future Working Group.
With this collective artistic research project initiated by Arndt Beck, YIDDISH.BERLIN is honoring an extraordinary figure: the feminist and anarchist activist Milly Witkop (1877–1955).
In the spring, Beck began tracing Milly’s footsteps in Yiddish archives and reading what they found with a small reading group. The result is a collective exhibition that investigates, honors, and makes visible Milly’s life through audio, drawings, text, mail art, collage, and more – accompanied by a series of events (see below).
Milly was born into a poor, frum family in the town of Zlatopil, in what is now Ukraine, the eldest of a tailor’s four daughters. At seventeen, she migrated on her own to London, where she soon became part of the circle around the Yiddish anarchist newspaper Arbeter Fraynd and one of the leading activists in the Jewish workers’ movement in early-twentieth-century London.
Milly lived through turbulant and combative times in England – including her own imprisonment and repeated migration. She then spent the Weimar years in Berlin, where she helped shape the Syndicalist Women’s Union (Syndikalistischer Frauenbund), and fled Germany immediately after the Reichstag fire, making her way to the United States via Switzerland. She lived outside New York for the rest of her life.
On the seventieth anniversary of her passing, we commemorate a life of political struggle for a just and humane world.
24 November – 2 December 2025, daily from 11 am
Opening: 23 November 2025, 4 pm
With an audio presentation by studio lärm and Anna Rozenfeld, a staged reading by Yossi Lampel, Guli Dolev-Hashiloni, Arndt Beck and music by Zhenja Oks.
And collective and individual artworks by Yael Merlini, Zuzanna Hertzberg, Ori Tor, among others.
I would want to write to someone A love letter, a love letter…
(Celia Dropkin)
Design: Osian Evans Sharma and Michelle Bernstein
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
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!
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:
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:
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.
The statue of Sholem Aleichem in Kyiv, Ukraine (c) Oleh Kushch / Wikimedia Commons
Unfortunately, the event is cancelled due to illness.
With Oleksandra Uralova (Kyiv/Berlin)
Within the literatures of Eastern Europe, Sholem Aleichem is one of the most important Jewish writers who wrote in Yiddish. Sholem Aleichem deals with the life of Jewish communities at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the relationships between Jewish and Christian neighbors, the connection between world history, politics and Jewish everyday life – and all of this is encountered in these texts against the background a Ukrainian landscape.
Born in Pereyaslav in Kyiv region, Sholem Aleichem, the master of “laughing through tears”, has visited many places that can be found on the contemporary map of Ukraine. And so our sarcastic author describes in his works the Ukrainian villages and towns parallel to the shtetln, where in the time of the Russian Empire the Jewish population had to live in the so-called Pale of Settlement.
Oleksandra Uralova is a researcher, writer and Yiddish teacher from Kyiv, who also works in the field of literary translation from Yiddish into Ukrainian. In 2019 she received the Feller Kovba Prize of the Ukrainian Association for Jewish Studies for her translation of Sholem Aleichem’s “Tevye, the Milkman”, and in the spring of 2022 her translations of Avrom Sutzkever’s “From the Vilna Ghetto” and “Green Aquarium” were awarded awarded the Sholem-Aleichem State Prize.
Yiddish.Berlin is thrilled. After years of hard work, three gutsy, talented voices from our own circle are ready to present their own original Yiddish poetry. Be there when Jake Schneider, Katerina Kuznetsova, and Jordan Lee Schnee share their creations with the public for the first time. With an introduction by Arndt Beck.
Counterclockwise from top-right: Arndt Beck, Jake Schneider, Katerina Kuznetsova, Jordan Lee Schnee
After the closing of our successful exhibition Mageyfe | Milkhome | Mame-Loshn in June, we’ve taken a short break from organizing events to enjoy a busy summer of other Yiddish activities. The one exception is our twice-monthly conversation group (shmueskrayz) “Shmues un Vayn,” which will be meeting next on the 4th and 16th of August. If you are in town and would like to join us, please email us for the locations and to join the shmueskrayz mailing list. Recent guests to the shmueskrayz have included Karo Wegner from Poland, Reb Noyekh Barrera from California, and Prof. Sara Feldman of Harvard University.
Announcement for the 11th Shmues un Vayn meetup (location removed)
On the somber 70th anniversary of the Night of the Murdered Soviet Yiddish Poets, we will not be hosting our own commemoration as we have the past four years. However, we will of course be individually involved in at least two of the many events to mark this sad occasion organized by other groups and institutions. We encourage you to join us at the symposium and reading at the Jewish Museum Berlin on 14 August as part of the Yiddish in Berlin summer program, or the night of remembrance on 12 August in Weimar, as part of Yiddish Summer Weimar.
Meanwhile, members of Yiddish.Berlin have recently been involved in:
An ELES Seminar in Rheinsberg about Yiddish run by four of us (Jordan Lee Schnee, Anna Rozenfeld, Irad Ben Isaak, and Katerina Kuznetsova) and featuring a performance by Daniel Kahn
The conference “The Avant-Garde in Yiddish Culture: The 100th Anniversary of Khalyastre” at Bar-Ilan University, including a presentation by Irad Ben Isaak
Generation J, a Yiddish-themed summer camp for young adults in Weimar
The first ever UK Yiddish Sof-Vokh: 48 hours of nonstop Yiddish in Yorkshire, including a Yiddish poetry writing workshop with Jake Schneider
Shtetl Berlin’s latest jam-packed “kleznick” (Klezmer picnic) by the Landwehr canal (photo below)
The bountiful musical, cultural, and Yiddish language programming at Yiddish Summer Weimar
The Shtetl Berlin “Kleznick” in July. Photo: Arndt Beck
Some of us will also be taking part in the comprehensive Yiddish in Berlin summer program organized by the Paris Yiddish Center – Medem Library in partnership with the FU’s Institute for East European Studies , which begins next week and is partnering with us for our second August shmueskrayz gathering.
We will be announcing more events of our own soon, and meanwhile we hope to see you af der yidisher gas!
Today, we find it especially important to raise awareness of Ukrainian culture, literature, and language. We are Yiddishists, and our contribution to this cause is speaking about Yiddish and Ukrainian connections, mutual influences, and literary and cultural intertwinings.
As languages, Yiddish and Ukrainian have much in common. They both still suffer from neglect and stereotypes, often being dismissed as “not proper languages” but rather dialects of the dominating German and Russian. The attitude towards the languages reflects cultural and political oppression.
In the event, we will give voice to Yiddish and Ukrainian poets of the 19th and 20th centuries by reading their works in original and translation. The first part focuses on the Ukrainian classics: Taras Shevchenko, Ivan Franko, and Lesya Ukrainka. In the 1930s, Dovid Hofshteyn, a Yiddish modernist poet born in Ukraine, translated their works into Yiddish. This project was more than just a translation. Hofshteyn found a way to express his own ideas on national identity and alienation through the works of Ukrainian poets.
The second part of the event includes works by Leyb Kvitko translated by the famous Ukrainian poet Pavlo Tychyna, as well as Yiddish modernist poetry by women such as Dvoyre Fogel. Our special guest, Ukrainian Yiddishist Iryna Zrobok , a Lviv-born translator from Yiddish and German into Ukrainian, will present her project about Yiddish female writers.
Readers:
Katerina Kuznetsova, Sofya Chernykh, Dina Gidon, August Kahn, Alina Klimanska, Boris Shavlov, Jake Schneider, Iryna Zadnipriana, Iryna Zrobok
The language of the event is English, with poetry readings in Yiddish and Ukrainian. (A booklet with all the texts, including English translations, will be available.)
The event is a part of the exhibition “Plague | War | Mother Tongue” (20 May – 1 June 2022), where you can see works by Helmut J. Psotta, Ella Ponizovsky-Bergelson, and Arndt Beck.
A Book Presentation with Historian Barry Trachtenberg
We are pleased to host a book presentation by historian Barry Trachtenberg of Wake Forest University, author of the new book The Holocaust and the Exile of Yiddish: A History of the Algemeyne Entsiklopedye (Rutgers University Press). His study traces an ambitious project that started in the 1930s, right here in Berlin: to publish a comprehensive encyclopedia of general knowledge completely in the Yiddish language. This dream drastically changed course within several years as the editors fled the Nazi regime and their intended readership of Eastern European Jews was decimated by genocide, dispersed by mass migration, and diluted by cultural assimilation.
In the mid-twentieth century, the project sparked tremendous controversy in Jewish cultural and political circles: What should a Yiddish encyclopedia be for? What knowledge and perspectives should it contain? By the time the last volumes were published, in 1960s New York, both the Yiddish-speaking world and the encyclopedia itself had been completely transformed by postwar circumstances. As Trachtenberg argues, this is not only a story about destruction and trauma, but also one of tenacity and continuity, as the encyclopedia’s compilers strove to preserve the heritage of Yiddish culture, to document its near-total extermination in the Holocaust, and to chart its path into the future.
The English-language book presentation by Barry Trachtenberg will be moderated by Jake Schneider of YIDDISH BERLIN. Questions from the audience are welcome – feel free to ask them in English, Yiddish, or German. This event accompanies our current exhibition Plague | War | Mother Tongue, which you can view at the gallery, featuring artworks by Ella Ponizovsky Bergelson, Arndt Beck, and the late Helmut J. Psotta.
More information about the book here on the website of Rutgers University Press.
Event information
28 May 2022, 7pm
Galerie Zeitzone, Adalbertstraße 79, 10997 Berlin
Admission free
Presentation and discussion in English, questions in Yiddish or German welcome
Barry Trachtenberg holds the Rubin Presidential Chair of Jewish History at Wake Forest University in North Carolina (USA). He is the author of The Revolutionary Roots of Modern Yiddish, 1903-1917 (2008) & The United States and the Nazi Holocaust: Race, Refuge, and Remembrance (2018).
