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Yiddish heroes
March 13, 2019 , 7:30 pm
A concert and lecture program, “Last Yiddish Heroes: Lost and Found Songs of Soviet Jews during World War II,” will be offered at 7:30 p.m. at Rutgers University’s Douglass Student Center, New Brunswick.
The Toby and Herbert Stolzer Endowed Program of Rutgers’ Allen and Joan Bildner Center for Jewish Studies will feature Psoy Korolenko, singer-songwriter; and Anna Shternshis, Al and Malka Green Professor of Yiddish Studies, University of Toronto.
In the early 1940s, a group of Soviet Jewish scholars began a remarkable project: gathering and safeguarding songs written by Jews who were facing annihilation during the Holocaust. Answering the call in Yiddish newspapers, handwritten song submissions came pouring in from Jews across Russia, Ukraine, and beyond — a testament to Jewish life in the Soviet Union. In the 1990s the collection was discovered in the basement of the Ukrainian National Library, where it had been hidden by the Soviet government. Korolenko and Shternshis bring these long-lost songs to life in this all-new program drawn from their 2019 Grammy-nominated CD, “Yiddish Glory: The Lost Songs of World War II.”
The program is free and open to the public. RSVP to rsvpBildner@sas.rutgers.edu or at BildnerCenter.Rutgers.edu.