Yiddishkayt | israel

2/7 | Birthday of Moyshe Stavsky

Today in Yiddishkayt… February 7 Birthday of Moyshe Stavsky (Moshe Stavi), Yiddish and Hebrew Writer Moyshe Stavsky was born in the White Russian shtetl of Antopol (today Антопаль, Belarus). His father was a maskil who ran a grain concern and was a leader of the town’s Jewish community. Although young Moyshe loathed going, he attended the local kheder until he reached bar-mitzva age and attended primary school in Antopol. After a fire at his family’s mill, young Moyshe and his family moved to Kremenchug. At 16 he left home and lived in Warsaw and, for a short...

Today in Yiddishkayt… February 11 Birthday of Zalman Shneour, Hebrew and Yiddish poet and novelist Zalman Shneour was born on February 11, 1886 to a middle-class family in Shklov, Belorussia (today Шклоў, Belarus). Shneour was, from a very early age, an avid reader of Hebrew literature. As a teenager, Shneour left his home and went to Odessa, then the capital of Zionist and Hebrew literary activity, where he was warmly received by Chaim Nachman Bialik, who became a kind of father figure for Shneour. In 1902, Shneour left for Warsaw and found work in the editorial office of the...

On March 17, yidARTS joins forces with the Israel Film Festival for the film’s West Coast premiere.

Today in Yiddishkayt… January 20 Yortsayt of Avrom Sutzkever, Poet and Partisan January 20 marks the second anniversary of the death of the great Yiddish poet Avrom Sutzkever, who died in Tel Aviv at the age of 96. He was born on July 15, 1913 in Smorgon (today Smarhoń, Belarus) about 60 miles from Vilna . He published his first work in the Jewish Scouts magazine and became a part of the writer and artist circle called יונג װילנע (Young Vilna). After the German invasion in the summer of 1941, Sutzkever and his wife Freydke used the guise of forced labor to help smuggle arms...

Today in Yiddishkayt… January 6 Birthday of Jacobo Timerman, Argentine Writer & Human Rights Activist Today is the birthday of Jacobo Timerman, born in Bar, Podolia Province, Ukraine on January 6, 1923. Raised in the Once neighborhood, Timeran was active in the leftist Zionist youth movement haShomer haTzair. He rose to prominence as a journalist and founder of the Buenos Aires, La Opinión. He defied the military junta by calling attention to the government’s campaign of terror against civilians in Argentina during the Guerra Sucia, or Dirty War, beginning in 1975. In 1977,...