"To Honor and Preserve: The Memories of Leo and Sylvia Dashefsky"

This exhibition is presented to you by the Museum through the cooperation of Batya Dashefsky, their daughter. She has created a lovely twenty-three minute slide show about her parents, her family et al. I recommend you visit this exhibition and watch her presentation (with music and narration) and think about how you might use your own unique creativity to honor your own family. This presentation spans many decades, from life in Erope to immigration, to immigrant Jewish life in America in the 1920s, Brownsville, Palestine, Syracuse, New York and Philadelphia.Mention is made of such organizations as Pioneer Women, Shomer Hatzair, the Labor Zionist Movement et al. Letters of correspondence are read, e.g. from pre-war Bialystok. Mention is also made of Grodno, Rezina in Bessarabia and Narewka, Poland.Also, Batya's father Leo dedicated his retirement to translating original Yiddish-language poetry and thus within the Museum' Yiddish Vinkl, if you have a mind to, you can read the English translations of such Yiddish poets and writers as Sholem Aleichem, Mordechai Gebirtig, Itzhak Katzenelson, H. Leivick, J. L. Peretz, Avraham Reisen and Yehoash.The exhibition begins here. This exhibition is ever-evolving; as the Museum receives more interesting, creative works of those who have honored their ancestors, they too will be added to this growing exhibition.

Elaine Rosenberg Miller has also written a small piece about her father's aunt which is included within the "To Honor and Preserve" exhibition. You can find it here.

Maurice Schwartz and his Yiddish Art Theatre

For more than sixty years Yiddish acting great Maurice Schwartz has directed and performed in more than one hundred plays both domestically and abroad. His dedication to performing plays of the highest quality exemplifies the artistry that occurred within the Yiddish Theatre in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. The Yiddish Theatre, in all its glory, was at its zenith on the Lower East Side of New York City, especially in the area on or about Second Avenue.

The photograph included here is of Schwartz (left) and novelist I. J. Singer, author of the novel from which Schwartz created the play "Yoshe Kalb."

For those of you whose interest lies in Yiddish theatre, you will enjoy perusing the more than twenty pages found within this exhibition. You can not only read about Maurice Schwartz the man (a link to an unpublished biography of Schwartz can be found within this exhibition), but also the actor. You can also see photographs of many of his productions and learn a bit about many of the Yiddish Art Theatre productions themselves, i.e. not only the plays his troupe performed, but also those who worked behind the scenes as well and the playwrights themselves. You will also learn a bit about Schwartz's acting troupe itself and the myriad of talented actors and actresses that once graced the Yiddish stage.

For those of you who do research about the Yiddish theatre, you will find not only a listing of most all his YAT productions, but also a page that lists in greater detil more than one hundred of his productions. This is especially interesting because of information these listings contain, e.g. full cast listing of the majority of those productions listed. You will typically find the title of the production, the playwright's name, the location and name of the theatre in which the YAT performed this production at, and the month and year the production opened. I am still missing information on many of these listings as well as complete information on other YAT productions, so if anyone has information that isn't available on this webpage, please contact me.

Though some of the material found within this exhibition has previously been presented by this online Museum, there is much new to be seen. To see this exhibition, please click here. The aforementioned page listing the more than one hundred YAT productions with casts of characters can be found at here. You can also find a listing with links to most of the Yiddish Theatre material at the Museum of Family History's Yiddish World here.

Lastly, for those of you who wish to hear and read in Yiddish (and English) some poetry written by Itzik Manger and Peretz Miransky, please visit the Museum's Yiddish Vinkl Poetry Corner here.