JTA - 09.05.2002

Yiddish Center in Vilnius Draws
Those Searching for History, Memories

By Adam Ellick

VILNIUS, Lithuania (JTA) — It is spoken by fewer than 1 million people in the world. It is not an official state language in any nation. And it carries a reputation as the vernacular of poor illiterate villagers. 

Despite a mini-renaissance in the last decade, Yiddish is hardly a blossoming international language. But the mame loshn, or mother tongue of Ashkenazi Jews, has found a summer home in the sleepy Lithuanian capital of Vilnius, where 70 students from around the world convened to spend their August toiling in a language that most insist is all but dead. 

For some, the curious endeavor is rooted in wanting to revisit family history. Others sought to further their linguistic expertise, while some saw the program as simply a chance to be Jewish. 

The Vilnius Yiddish Institute, the first academic Yiddish institute in Eastern Europe since the Holocaust, recently completed the fifth annual Vilnius Summer Program. The program is split between classroom and culture: intensive linguistics by morning and an array of theater, walking tours and lectures by night. 

Before the war, Vilna, as the city is called in Yiddish, was known as the “Jerusalem of the North” and the capital of world Yiddish culture. It housed the first Yiddish academic institute — YIVO, now headquartered in New York — some 100 synagogues and six daily Jewish newspapers. 

“There is so much about the Holocaust that’s being done by many, but we want to stress the living civilization that was in all this area. The Holocaust is our tragedy but this is our treasure,” says institute director Mendy Cahan, a Belgian-born Israeli who founded Yung Yiddish, a grass-roots Yiddish center in Israel. 

The summer course offers four levels of classes, starting with beginners and ending with advanced Yiddish literature. The professors, among the world’s elite, came from as far as Israel and Argentina. 

The cultural agenda included visits to shtetls — where survivors told the students about their happy Yiddish childhoods before World War II and their tragic memories from the Holocaust, when more than 94 percent of local Jews were murdered by Nazis and their Lithuanian cohorts.

This year the program added the first-ever Vilnius Yiddish Film Festival and Yiddish Musical Festival to its agenda. The students also formed their own klezmer band. 

The participants, who ranged in age from 14 to 77 and came from 21 different countries, lived in the former Jewish ghetto, among the largest in Europe. 

Arlene Schwartz, 49, from Sydney, Australia, took up Yiddish — a combination of Hebrew, German and Slavic — four years ago. For her, Yiddish means “memories of my grandparents,” both of whom came from Lithuania. 

“I have this rush of childhood memories. It has been my own personal journey,” Schwartz said. “Now I have a bit of understanding of what made them, who they were, because over the years they didn’t westernize all that much. They remained very strongly shtetl people in their dress, food, simplicity. And I think I have regained some of that.” 

Micah Fitzerman-Blue, 20, a student at Harvard College, described himself as “a Jewish summer junkie, like many other American Jewish teen-agers.” 

“While Israel as an important experience, there is another aspect of my heritage, the Ashkenazi heritage,” he said. “I am much more a product of descendants of Vilna than I am of Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. 

“I feel that too much of the American Jewish identity is dependent on the well-being of Israel,” he continued. “But I feel that this summer I was able to return to my true homeland.” 

After his first-ever Yiddish experience, Fitzerman-Blue is hardly fluent. But he now feels “comfortable talking to my bubbe,” and he will deliver a short presentation to her Yiddish book circle in Michigan when he returns home. 

Saeko Shibayama, a non-Jewish Japanese student, came to Vilna after completing her undergraduate thesis in Tokyo on Yiddish translations of the bible. Her Vilna experience was especially precious because she can only practice Yiddish with a handful of people in Japan. 

“I spent my time in my apartment with two girls from Poland,” she says. “We tried to speak only in Yiddish. So I hope my communication ability improved.” 

Shibayama also was touched by Vilna’s Holocaust history.

A flutist, she also played in a klezmer band for the first time, and hopes to join one when she studies in Canada next year. 

One of the more spiritual journeys to Vilna was that of Doris and Gernot Jonas from Namedy, Germany, where Gernot is a retired Protestant pastor who works to expose Christians to Jewish traditions. He began studying Yiddish in 1988. 

“After the Shoah, I wanted to relearn and reface our history,” Gernot Jonas said. “I cannot put that aside everyday, what my people did here in Vilnius. The killing and the murder is everywhere. You can see it. When you go everywhere you are always reminded of the suffering of the Jewish people.” 

Upon his return to Germany, he plans to translate books by Sholem Aleichem from Yiddish to German so he can “keep alive this beautiful language.” 

During the academic year, the Vilnius Yiddish Institute offers linguistic and Jewish history classes for Lithuanian students at Vilnius University. 

It was co-founded last year by Cahan and Dovid Katz, the academic director from New York, who started Yiddish at Oxford University in the 1970s.