From Iosif Vaisman, in his description of the first Yiddish language conference:
The First Conference for the Yiddish Language, also known as the Tshernovits Conference, opened on Sunday, August 30, 1908. The Conference was convened to discuss very important topics, formulated in the ten point Conference agenda. To what extent the Conference succeeded in finding the solutions to any of these ten problems has been a subject of discussions (sometimes quite fierce) ever since. A simple look at the agenda is sufficient to see that many issues have yet to be resolved:
1. Yiddish spelling
2. Yiddish grammar
3. Foreign words and new words
4. A Yiddish dictionary
5. Jewish youth and the Yiddish language
6. The Yiddish press
7. The Yiddish theater and Yiddish actors
8. The economic status of Yiddish writers
9. The economic status of Yiddish actors
10. Recognition for the Yiddish language
In October 2008 Boris Sandler, Editor-in-Chief of the Forverts newspaper, gave a speech in Yiddish to attendees of the IAYC (International Association of Yiddish Clubs) conference about the development of Yiddish literature since this 1908 conference.
A transcript of his talk on this subject is available now in English and can be found within the "ERC Lecture Series" at the Museum's Education and Research Center.
You can read a transcript of his talk at www.museumoffamilyhistory.com/iayc2008-sandler.htm .
Showing posts with label czernowitz. Show all posts
Showing posts with label czernowitz. Show all posts
Friday, March 26, 2010
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
"Glimpses of Yiddish Czernowitz": A Forverts Film
A new film comes to you from the Forverts, i.e. the Yiddish Forward newspaper. The film is in Yiddish but has English subtitles. You can see the film's trailer at www.museumoffamilyhistory.com/sr-30-yiddish-czernowitz.htm .
Here is a description of the film:
Here is a description of the film:
Bukovina—land of the beech tree spreading its branches across the Carpathian Mountains with its turbulent rivers and rushing streams. More than one generation of forest merchants and cattle drivers in partnership with the local peasantry drew their livelihood from the land. Czernowitz was blessed with resonant names—the Big City, Little Vienna, Jerusalem on the Prut, Jerusalem of Bukovina.
Short, but abundant visually, this filmic essay expresses critical historical moments of Jewish life in the city and region, from the first Jewish language conference to the torment of the Transnistrian deportation and subsequent decline of Jewish life in the post War period. Featuring contemporary interviews alongside original archival images, the film presents Czernowitz through native personalities such as fabulist and pedagogue Eliezer Steinbarg, beloved actress Sidi Tal, drama critic Moyshe Loyev, writer Josef Burg, poet Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman, and linguist Prof. Wolf Moskovich.
Glimpses of Yiddish Czernowitz is a visual tale of an all but lost Jewish community. The film awakens our longing and calls us back to seek out the traces of that city of our dreams—the Jerusalem on the Prut.
Monday, February 22, 2010
"Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory"
Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer have written a book about Czernowitz and the Museum, within the context of its Yiddish Vinkl Bookstore, has put online a synopsis of the book along with the book's preface. Here is a synopsis of the book:
The 20th century is over. Yet displaced survivors of its horrific wars and murderous “ethnic cleansings,” and their descendants now scattered throughout the world, are still haunted by the places they or their ancestors once called “home.” Many have made it their mission to research familial and cultural pasts, to revisit ancestral homes and to retrace the steps of lost family members, even when their initial information is scant. This longing for the past continues well into the twenty-first century and, in fact, is fueled by the enhanced possibilities for research offered by the Internet and even by DNA and genetic testing. Many important and minor sites that have long ceased to exist enjoy an active afterlife on the world wide web with websites devoted to them, listservs with growing memberships, and lively communities exchanging pictures and stories about their own or their parents’ past. This desire to reconstruct lost worlds seems to cross-generational, national, and ethnic lines.
We write about the afterlife in memory and history of one such place, Czernowitz – a city in Eastern Europe where, until its shattering and dispersal in the era of the Second World War, a large and assimilated -- predominantly German-speaking -- Jewish community once flourished.
Initially fascinating to us was the fact that Czernowitz, as a political entity, had in fact ceased to exist in 1918, with the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg Empire in the aftermath of World War I. Yet throughout its subsequent iterations – Cernauti under Romanian rule, Chernovtsi, under the Soviets – its Jewish inhabitants continued to live there as though not much had changed. They held on to what the Habsburgs had been able to offer Jews – emancipation and the promise of social integration and equality, in exchange for linguistic and cultural assimilation to Austrian ways of life. Even those who survived deportation and immense suffering under fascist/Nazi domination continued to maintain and to transmit to us -- the postwar generation -- strongly positive, nostalgic memories of a tolerant multi-ethnic city and culture that had long disappeared in reality. At the very same time, however, they also transmitted traumatic memories of persecution, deportation, displacement, and the loss of home.
Ghosts of Home follows several generations of people from this city and their descendants. Through interviews and oral accounts, memoirs, family albums, objects and memorabilia, and through a number of trips to present-day Chernivtsi (now Ukraine), we tell a multi-stranded story about twentieth century European Jews. Parts of that story are familiar: the story of Jewish assimilation and secularization, of the German-Jewish symbiosis that was to turn so tragic, of the encounter between fascism and communism, of the lure of Zionism and Hebrew, and the equally powerful lure of diaspora nationalism and Yiddish, and, of course, the story of the Holocaust. But, situated at the crossroads between East and West, and between the Soviet and Western spheres, Czernowitz also offers unknown stories about the fate of Europe’s Jews: stories of resilience, rescue and survival, of choices made in impossible circumstances, of the continuation of normality under extremity, of the perpetuation of the dream of multi-ethnic tolerance against immeasurable odds. In this first historical account in English of Czernowitz, we bring this dream to life, but we also show how the search for the past can result in active engagements with the present, even when that present is located across the world.
You can read the preface of the book at www.museumoffamilyhistory.com/yv-ghosts-of-home.htm .
The 20th century is over. Yet displaced survivors of its horrific wars and murderous “ethnic cleansings,” and their descendants now scattered throughout the world, are still haunted by the places they or their ancestors once called “home.” Many have made it their mission to research familial and cultural pasts, to revisit ancestral homes and to retrace the steps of lost family members, even when their initial information is scant. This longing for the past continues well into the twenty-first century and, in fact, is fueled by the enhanced possibilities for research offered by the Internet and even by DNA and genetic testing. Many important and minor sites that have long ceased to exist enjoy an active afterlife on the world wide web with websites devoted to them, listservs with growing memberships, and lively communities exchanging pictures and stories about their own or their parents’ past. This desire to reconstruct lost worlds seems to cross-generational, national, and ethnic lines.
We write about the afterlife in memory and history of one such place, Czernowitz – a city in Eastern Europe where, until its shattering and dispersal in the era of the Second World War, a large and assimilated -- predominantly German-speaking -- Jewish community once flourished.
Initially fascinating to us was the fact that Czernowitz, as a political entity, had in fact ceased to exist in 1918, with the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg Empire in the aftermath of World War I. Yet throughout its subsequent iterations – Cernauti under Romanian rule, Chernovtsi, under the Soviets – its Jewish inhabitants continued to live there as though not much had changed. They held on to what the Habsburgs had been able to offer Jews – emancipation and the promise of social integration and equality, in exchange for linguistic and cultural assimilation to Austrian ways of life. Even those who survived deportation and immense suffering under fascist/Nazi domination continued to maintain and to transmit to us -- the postwar generation -- strongly positive, nostalgic memories of a tolerant multi-ethnic city and culture that had long disappeared in reality. At the very same time, however, they also transmitted traumatic memories of persecution, deportation, displacement, and the loss of home.
Ghosts of Home follows several generations of people from this city and their descendants. Through interviews and oral accounts, memoirs, family albums, objects and memorabilia, and through a number of trips to present-day Chernivtsi (now Ukraine), we tell a multi-stranded story about twentieth century European Jews. Parts of that story are familiar: the story of Jewish assimilation and secularization, of the German-Jewish symbiosis that was to turn so tragic, of the encounter between fascism and communism, of the lure of Zionism and Hebrew, and the equally powerful lure of diaspora nationalism and Yiddish, and, of course, the story of the Holocaust. But, situated at the crossroads between East and West, and between the Soviet and Western spheres, Czernowitz also offers unknown stories about the fate of Europe’s Jews: stories of resilience, rescue and survival, of choices made in impossible circumstances, of the continuation of normality under extremity, of the perpetuation of the dream of multi-ethnic tolerance against immeasurable odds. In this first historical account in English of Czernowitz, we bring this dream to life, but we also show how the search for the past can result in active engagements with the present, even when that present is located across the world.
You can read the preface of the book at www.museumoffamilyhistory.com/yv-ghosts-of-home.htm .
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Take a Virtual Tour of the Museum's "World Jewish Communities"
Some months back, the Museum of Family History created its very own, unique "World Jewish Communities" exhibition. The purpose of this permanent exhibition is not merely to create a page about a shtetl, town or city, but to "paint a picture" of the town--not how it is today of course, but how it might have been when once there existed a strong and vibrant Jewish population.
The one requirement for becoming one of the Museum's "World Jewish Communities" had been the inclusion of some multimedia aspect, i.e. some audio or video, as opposed to just text and photographs. However, with the availability of so much more material, e.g. that which exists in such resources as the Yizkor book and other books and memoirs, much more is possible and required.
Much of what has been put together to date has been for three Jewish communities: Czernowitz, Ukraine; Ozarow, Poland; and Zambrow, Poland.
Visit any of these World Jewish Communities at the Museum and take a "virtual tour." When you do, just imagine that each web page is a station or stop along the tour if you were taking this audio walking tour on your own within a "real" museum, while you're wearing a headset and carrying around some sort of IPod or infrared device.
You will be sent from room to room or station to station, and as you go, you will be learning as about each town. As you do, a picture will be painted of the town.
This exhibition is ongoing and ever evolving; more content will be added to each Community in the near future, and more communities will be added.
All the town links can be found at www.museumoffamilyhistory.com/wjc.htm .
The one requirement for becoming one of the Museum's "World Jewish Communities" had been the inclusion of some multimedia aspect, i.e. some audio or video, as opposed to just text and photographs. However, with the availability of so much more material, e.g. that which exists in such resources as the Yizkor book and other books and memoirs, much more is possible and required.
Much of what has been put together to date has been for three Jewish communities: Czernowitz, Ukraine; Ozarow, Poland; and Zambrow, Poland.
Visit any of these World Jewish Communities at the Museum and take a "virtual tour." When you do, just imagine that each web page is a station or stop along the tour if you were taking this audio walking tour on your own within a "real" museum, while you're wearing a headset and carrying around some sort of IPod or infrared device.
You will be sent from room to room or station to station, and as you go, you will be learning as about each town. As you do, a picture will be painted of the town.
This exhibition is ongoing and ever evolving; more content will be added to each Community in the near future, and more communities will be added.
All the town links can be found at www.museumoffamilyhistory.com/wjc.htm .
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