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Bosnian Jews mourn Moris Albahari, one of Sarajevo’s last Ladino speakers
(JTA) — Moris Albahari, a Holocaust survivor, former partisan fighter and one of the last Ladino speakers in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s dwindling Jewish community, passed away at the age of 93 last month.
It is believed that he was one of four native Ladino speakers remaining in a country where the Judeo-Spanish language once flourished and was spoken by luminaries like Flory Jagoda, the grande dame of Ladino song, and Laura Bohoretta, the founder of a uniquely Sephardic feminist movement in Bosnia.
Bosnia’s small Jewish community — with barely 900 members throughout the country, 500 of whom live in Sarajevo — are mourning the loss of a living link to communal memory as well as a dear friend.
“From you, uncle Moco, I learned a lot about Judaism, about life, about nature and especially about people. About both the good and the evil,” Igor Kožemjakin, the cantor of the Sarajevo Jewish community, wrote in a memorial post on Facebook, referring to Moris as “Čika,” or uncle, a term of endearment in Bosnian.
“It is a terrible loss, especially for Sarajevo. Our community is very small, especially after the Holocaust,” Eliezer Papo, a Sarajevo-born Jew and scholar of Ladino language and literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “We’re not speaking just in terms of prominent members of the community, we’re speaking in terms of family members. Everyone is like a family member.”
When Albahari was growing up in the 1930s, the Jewish community of his native Sarajevo numbered over 12,000. Jews made up more than a fifth of the city and it was one of the most important centers of Jewish life in the western Balkans.
In his youth, the city was part of what was then the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Formed out of the borderlands between the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, it was a multiethnic state composed of Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks, Slovenians, Macedonians, Hungarians, Albanians and more. Among them were many Jewish communities both Ashkenazi and Sephardic.
The unique mix of of Muslim, Jewish, Catholic and Orthodox Christian communities, with their mosques, synagogues and churches defining Sarajevo’s skyline, earned the city the nickname “Little Jerusalem.”
Speaking in a 2015 documentary made by American researchers, “Saved by Language,” Albahari explained that his family traced their roots back to Cordoba before the Spanish Inquisition, and through Venice, before settling in what would become Bosnia when it was part of the Ottoman Empire.
“We didn’t want to ‘just’ write an article about Moris or Sarajevo; we wanted [the audience] to see what we saw and hear what we heard,” Brian Kirschen, professor of Ladino at Binghamton University, who worked on the documentary with author Susanna Zaraysky, told JTA. “This resulted in a grassroots initiative to create the documentary.”
In the film, Albahari takes the researchers and their viewers on a tour through what was Jewish Sarajevo, giving glimpses of the thriving Ladino speaking community in which he was raised and explaining how ithe language would save him many times, when the Nazis and their Croat allies, the Ustaša, came to shatter it.
“In sharing your story of survival during the Holocaust, you opened doors that remained closed for decades,” Kirschen said in a memorial post on Facebook. “Some of your stories were even new to members of your family, but each survivor has their own timeline. While you experienced great pain during your life, from your story, we also learn about moments of kindness and heroism. Through your story, you also taught us about the power of language.”
Albahari wasn’t yet a teenager when, in 1941, Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy invaded Yugoslavia. The Nazis occupied the eastern portion of the country, including what is now Serbia, while they raised up a Croat fascist party, known as the Ustaša, to administer the newly formed “Independent State of Croatia” — often known by its Serbo-Croatian initials, NDH — in the western regions that included the modern-day Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The Ustaša collaborated in the Nazis’ genocidal plans for Europe’s Jewish and Roma comunities, and they had genocidal designs of their own for the Orthodox Serb communities living in the NDH.
To that end they established the Jasenovac concentration camp, which would become known as the Auschwitz of the Balkans. By the war’s end it had become the third largest concentration camp in Europe, and behind its walls the overwhelming majority of Sarajevo’s Jews — at least 10,000 — were massacred. Including Serbs, Jews, Roma and political dissidents of Croat or Muslim Bosniak background, as many as 100,000 people were killed in Jasenovac.
Albahari was 11 years old when the Ustaša came to deport him and his large family to Jasenovac. A former teacher working as an Ustaša guard in the town of Drvar, where the train stopped, warned Albahari’s father, David, about their destination, and he was able to help his son escape from the train.
The teacher helped guide the young Moris to an Italian soldier named Lino Marchione who was secretly helping Jews.
This was the first case when Albahari’s Ladino came in handy. Ladino is largely based on medieval Spanish, with a mixture of Hebrew, Aramaic, Turkish and other languages mixed in. For speakers of Serbo-Croatian, a Slavic language, it’s entirely incomprehensible. But for a speaker of another Romance language such as Italian, it’s not such a stretch to understand, and Moris was able to converse with his Italian savior.
With his family gone, he was taken in by a Serb family, and changed his name to Milan Adamovic to hide his Jewish identity. Still, by 1942, it became clear that neither as Adamovic nor Albahari would he be safe in the town. So he fled to the mountains.
“If there was [a battle] I took clothes from a dead soldier to wear, I lived like a wolf in the mountains, you know. Visiting villages [asking for something] to give me for eating, it was a terrible time,” Albahari recalled in “Saved By Language.”
He would only feel safe in villages under the control of partisan forces. Yugoslavia was the only country in Europe to be liberated from Nazi rule by its own grassroots resistance.
During his time in the mountains, Albahari joined up with a partisan unit aligned with the movement of Josip Broz Tito, who would lead Communist Yugoslavia after the war. By the war’s end, Tito’s partisans numbered over 80,000 and included more than 6,000 Jews, many in prominent positions, such as Moša Pijade, who would go on to serve as vice president of the Yugoslav parliament after the war.
Moris was out on patrol as a partisan when he came upon a group of American and British paratroopers. They raised their weapons at him, thinking he was an enemy. Moris tried to communicate, but he spoke no English.
When he asked the soldiers if they spoke German or Italian, they shook their heads. When he asked about Spanish, one perked up: a Hispanic-American soldier by the name of David Garijo.
In Ladino, Alabahari was able to explain that he was not an enemy but could lead them to a nearby partisan camp where they would be safe.
“Ladino saved my life in the war,” Albahari recalled in the documentary.
At the partisan camp, Morris received even bigger news: The family that he had assumed had all perished after he left the train were in fact alive. The former school teacher and Ustaša guard who had warned his father had met them at the next train junction to help them escape. Furthermore, around half of the Jews in the train car were able to escape using the same hole Moris used during his initial escape.
Ultimately the family all survived the war, unlike so many other Jews of Sarajevo.
“Where is Samuel, where is Dudo, where is Gedala? They never came back,” Albahari lamented, listing missing neighbors while walking through Sarajevo’s old Jewish neighborhood in the documentary. “Maybe we are happy because we are alive after the Second World War, but also unlikely because every day we must cry for these dead people.”
When Moris returned to Sarajevo, it was an entirely different place from the bustling Jewish community he had once known.
Gone was the sound of Ladino in the streets and alleyways of Bascarsija, the market district where so many of Sarajevo’s Jews had once lived. Gone were the synagogues — only one of the many synagogues that had existed before WWII still functions. Gone was the robust Jewish life that was once a central part of Sarajevo.
Moris was still only 14 by the war’s end, so he returned to school and ultimately graduated at the top of his class. He became a pilot and later director of the Sarajevo Airport.
In this new world, Ladino was spoken, if at all, only in the home.
“Always, when I hear Spanish, I hear my father and mother, and all the synagogues, prayers in Ladino and rabbis who spoke Ladino. But that is in the past,” Albahari says in “Saved by Language.”
Eliezer Papo, who is a generation younger than Albahari, recalled that in his youth Ladino had long been reduced to a language of secrets.
“Mostly, Ladino was used when the elders didn’t want youngsters to understand,” Papo said.
Only later, in the 1980s, did community members realize what was being lost and begin to gather to maintain their language, recount what Jewish Sarajevo had been like and share their wartime stories of survival.
“He never took his story to the places of revenge, but he took it and his life experience to a place of ‘Never again,’ not just ‘Never again for Jews’, but never again for anybody,” said Papo.
Like many Sarajevans, World War II would not be the last major conflict Albahari would see. Less than 40 years later, war would once again come to Sarajevo with the break-up of Yugoslavia.
From 1992-1995 the city remained under constant siege by Bosnian Serb forces looking to break away from what would become Bosnia and Herzegovina. Moris joined with other Jews of Sarajevo in working to provide aid to their fellow Sarajevans during the harsh period.
Sarajevo’s synagogue was turned into a shelter and a soup kitchen. The community ran a network of underground pharmacies and a message service allowing Sarajevans to get word to family and friends outside of the city during what became the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare.
“Moris was an inspirational persona to many members of Jewish community and La Benevolencija,” Vlado Anderle, the current president of that local Jewish humanitarian organization told JTA. “He was a man with such inviting spirit and energy.”
When the dust settled on the breakup of Yugoslavia, and the new Bosnian state rose from its ashes, Moris found himself once again in a new role.
During the communist era in Yugoslavia, religious activity was discouraged. Sarajevo’s Jews emphasized the ethnic character of Jewish culture rather than the religious one. In the new Bosnia and Herzegovina, that was no longer true. So the community worked to reconnect with their religious identity as well.
“Everybody looked up to the people who had Jewish upbringing before the Second World War,” Papo recalled. “This doesn’t mean that they were rabbis. Just that they knew it better than anyone else.”
Moris, whose formal Jewish education ended in his preteen years, was appointed president of the community’s religious committee.
As such it often fell on him to represent Judaism to the Bosnian society at large, often in a very creative way, according to Papo, who in addition to being a scholar of Ladino is ordained as a rabbi and serves the Sarajevo community as a rabbi-at-large from Israel.
In one case, while being interviewed on a major Bosnian television station, Moris was asked why Jews cover their head with a kippah or other hat during prayer. Moris’ response, or rather creative interpretation, as Papo called it, was made up on the spot.
Moris’ interpretation began with the ancient temple in Jerusalem where Jews once had to fully immerse in a ritual bath before entering.
“Since the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed it was reduced to washing the uncovered parts of the body only, before entering a synagogue, similarly to Muslims: the feet, the head, the hands…” Papo recalled him saying. But in Europe, as Moris’ answer went, they began to cover more and more of their body. “In Europe they started wearing shoes, so the feet were not uncovered anymore, and then they started wearing a hat, not to have to wash their head… you know it’s Europe, one could catch a cold if going out with wet hair…”
“A few months later, I came to Sarajevo, and found that everyone has heard this explanation and is talking about it, not just people in the community, but in the street,” Papo said. “And you know, I let it pass, I couldn’t correct them, it was just so beautiful. That was his genius.”
“Identity is all about telling stories. And Moris was one of the great storytellers of the community,” Papo added. And through his stories he expressed an identity which was “made of the same contradictions that Sephardic Judaism is made of, that Sarajevo is made of, that Bosnia and Herzegovina is made and that Yugoslavia was and is made of and that the Balkans are made of.”
Albahari is survived by his wife and a son.
—
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‘I didn’t want to let go of her; I loved her to death’
They buried Lisa Fliegel this week. Vital organs were not included because the 65 year-old trauma therapist had decided that her final act of tikun olam was to donate them and keep several people alive. For Fliegel, a dual citizen of the U.S. and Israel, tikun olam was a lifelong mission. And so, now in Florida a man breathes with Fliegel’s lungs. Fliegel’s liver is keeping a woman in California alive. The two kidneys went to two different states. Fliegel even donated her tissue, an act that has the potential of healing more than 75 others.
That is all the eulogy you need for Lisa Fliegel but two rabbis, her childhood friends, stood in the rain at a Massachusetts cemetery and choked back tears. Dozens of mourners walked in and sat beneath a canopy just before the rain started falling.
Fliegel’s work as a trauma therapist included stints counseling the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing, combatants in Northern Ireland and most recently, the survivors of the massacre in Israel on Oct. 7.
“How could one person be such a blessing to so many people in so many places at so many different times?” Rabbi Elana Kanter of the New Shul in Scottsdale, AZ asked the mourners.
Kanter and Fliegel attended the Solomon Schechter day school in Newton, MA together. Rabbi Kanter recalled how when Fliegel was in third grade, she mediated a dispute between a couple of her classmates by getting them to sign a treaty pledging not to fight any more. Laughter broke the sobs of a drizzly afternoon.
Kanter’s brother Raphael, rabbi emeritus at Tifereth Israel Congregation in New Bedford, MA, said it was possible that Fliegel was one of the lamed vavniks, the 36 righteous individuals that, according to the Talmud, exist in every generation and sustain the world. Do we, then, have a new tzadik in our midst? It was, Kanter said, the first time in all his years as a rabbi that he ever suggested someone was worthy of the designation.
A deep connection to Israel
Fliegel bought a plane ticket to Israel three hours after news of the Hamas attack broke. She went at the urging of old friends in the Zionist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair. Fliegel arrived on Oct. 22 in Eilat where she was embedded with evacuees from the kibbutzim and small towns in the Gaza Envelope. She teamed up with two Israeli social workers in a hotel occupied by residents of the Nir Oz kibbutz.
Her clinical supervisor during the months she spent in Eilat was David Senesh, an expat Israeli psychotherapist based in Berlin. He happens to be the nephew of Hannah Senesh, the Jewish heroine who was captured, tortured and executed trying to rescue Jews in Nazi-occupied Hungary. Senesh called Fliegel’s work in the aftermath of Oct. 7 “committed and courageous.”
“Her ability to extend herself as a person and therapist to the full range of human experience, beyond formal political and cultural divides, taught me how to maintain helpful relations amidst havoc and confusion,” he wrote.
Fliegel had a long and deep connection to Israel. She left her home in Massachusetts at the age of 17 to make aliyah. After serving in the Israeli Defense Force, she spent 20 years living at Kibbutz Ketura in southern Israel.
Lisa Fliegel was a Zionist and a defender of Palestinian rights. Her rachmonis for the Palestinians seems to have stemmed from what she once described as her own “boatload of trauma.” Fliegel lost her mother when she was just 12 and her older sister Dina, a social worker and union activist, succumbed to leukemia. Social work was the family business. Both of Fliegel’s parents were social workers. Her mother had a major impact on welfare reform in Massachusetts. Her father helped people uprooted by urban renewal projects. Their labors now ceased, three social workers and a trauma therapist rest together in the B’nai Abraham Cemetery in Beverly, MA.
The mourners were not all Jews. Two of Fliegel’s former colleagues from the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute were there. The center serves families impacted by murder and other traumas. Demaris Ortiz worked with Fliegel for four years, sometimes spending a year or two with her on a single case, advocating for the survivors of homicide victims.
“Lisa uplifted us. She taught me so much,” Ortiz told me over the phone before breaking into tears. “She became my family. She didn’t judge people. She adopted people.”
‘Things will be better’
Hank Rosenfeld did not make it to the funeral. The Santa Monica-based author met Fliegel 30-plus years ago in the Catskills. They’ve been on again and off again over the years but Rosenfeld said she was his bashert. He had been helping Fliegel with her memoir Bulletproof Therapist for several years. Fliegel flew to California to work with him on a first-person account of her run-ins with the Hilltop Youth, the group of extremist West Bank settlers who have carried out killings, arson, vandalism and theft of livestock in Palestinian villages.
Fliegel arrived in San Diego last week to stay with Rosenfeld at his mother’s house there. They spent about four hours together before she collapsed in the bedroom. At the hospital tests revealed she had suffered a brain hemorrhage. A neurologist, Rosenfeld told me, was in tears. Fliegel was kept alive until recipients for her organs could be found.
On Sunday, Lisa Fliegel was wheeled past medical personnel holding candles on her way to an operating room where organs would be removed. The walk of honor, as its known, had a soundtrack: Hank Rosenfeld played a recording of David Broza accompanied by a children’s choir singing “Things Will Be Better.” Then he recited a brief Leonard Cohen poem that had fallen out of Fliegel’s notebook.
“I held her hand. I didn’t want to let go of her,” said Rosenfeld. “I loved her to death.”
The post ‘I didn’t want to let go of her; I loved her to death’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Why France celebrated a Jewish avenger of Ukrainian pogroms
Some 81 years ago this month, a person in Warsaw would have enjoyed the odd spectacle of a mob of Jews surrounding France’s Polish embassy, wildly proclaiming the greatness of the French Republic. The occasion: Jews everywhere were celebrating France because, after a sensational eight-day trial (which even made the front page of The New York Times), a jury of 12 petit-bourgeois Parisians had astonishingly acquitted the Ukrainian-born Jewish immigrant and anarchist Sholom Schwartzbard of the charge of murder for shooting to death former Ukrainian president Symon Petliura in the middle of the Latin Quarter, an act the accused fully acknowledged committing.
Schwartzbard had declared to the police (who in turn informed the press) that he had killed Petliura to avenge the slaughter of tens of thousands of Jews in the 1919 Ukrainian pogroms. The massacres had been perpetrated by armies fighting in the civil war that erupted after the Russian Revolution — among them troops of the short-lived Ukrainian National Republic, which Petliura headed. (To this day, historians debate the extent of Petliura’s responsibility for the pogroms.)
In court, Schwartzbard’s attorneys managed to turn the tables, and effectively put Petliura on trial. The defense successfully argued that Schwartzbard should not be held guilty of murder, because Petliura was responsible for the pogroms, which claimed the lives of 15 of Schwartzbard’s relatives. A French law review of the day described the argument on Schwartzbard’s behalf as yet another crime-of-passion defense.
This defense worked because France rallied to Schwartzbard’s cause, in an outpouring of pro-Jewish, anti-pogrom sentiment. Seventeen months passed between Petliura’s assassination on May 25, 1926 ,and Schwartzbard’s trial, which ran from October 18 through October 26, 1927, and all that time France’s newspapers mainly kept up sympathetic coverage, with the notable exception of right-wing stalwarts Le Figaro and l’Action Française. The country’s most respected intellectuals flocked en masse to the Schwartzbard camp, publicly endorsing the justice of his deed.
Today, that national outburst of pro-Jewish sentiment would likely strike most American Jews as surprising and somewhat unbelievable, sandwiched as it was between France’s notorious antisemitic episodes — the Dreyfus trial over 30 years before and the Vichy government’s deportations of Jews to German concentration camps 15 years later. What is more, in recent years, Jews have been reminded of this ugly history by high-visibility anti-Jewish violence coming from France’s Muslim youths — often poor, disaffected and furious about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The frequency of violence probably peaked in 2004, but the 2006 kidnapping-torture-murder of a 23-year-old French Jew, Ilan Halimi, left more American Jews than ever convinced that France is an antisemitic country.
How is it, then, that the world saw such an upswell of philosemitism in France around the Schwartzbard case? Was this an aberration, merely a time-out from prejudice?
Actually, things were going well for Jews in general in France in the 1920s. So much so that one American Jewish tourist, fresh off the ship from Europe, declared to the Forward newspaper, “There is no antisemitism in France.”
Those were halcyon days partly because the country was relatively prosperous, which tends to enhance tolerance. France had near-full employment and the economy and the wages of workingmen were growing. During the 1927 trial, the French were enjoying a particularly strong sense of well-being because the return to power of Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré in July 1926 had brought an end to years of financial crises and stabilized the franc, which had been ruined by war.
At the same time, Jews had become curiously chic. A circle of Jewish literary lions came of age and sold their books to a wide audience. These included books about Jews and Judaism, such as Edmond Fleg’s (né Flegenheimer) “Why I Am a Jew.” Best-selling writer Albert Londres, a gentile, spent months visiting the world’s Jewish communities in order to write “Le Juif errant est arrivé” (“The Wandering Jew Has Arrived”).
In addition, it was crucial to the trial that the terrible war of 1914 to 1918 remained the foremost fact in French consciousness through the 1920s. All of France had pulled together for the war effort, making taboo antisemitism and other forms of prejudice. And Schwartzbard himself was emblematic of the French cause in the war — no one could miss the Croix de Guerre he wore to court, which had been awarded him when he was wounded in battle after volunteering to fight for France (as had 36,000 other Jewish immigrants).
Even the staunchly right-wing and hitherto antisemitic newspaper La Liberté ran a front-page editorial calling for Schwartzbard to be acquitted — as a noble soldier who had fought for France. Whereas, as the defense never missed an opportunity to remind the court, Petliura had allied his army with Germany in 1918.
Paradoxically, the Dreyfus Affair deserves major credit for Schwartzbard’s acquittal. First of all, it recruited intellectuals into a leadership role in civic affairs and institutionalized them as a lobby that Schwartzbard’s lawyer, Henry Torrès, was able to activate for Schwartzbard in a massive public relations campaign. They included the likes of the writer Joseph Kessel (perhaps best known today for his novel “Belle de jour”) and future prime minister Léon Blum (one of the five French Jews who, over the course of the country’s history, have served as its head of government, a record unmatched outside of Israel).
Perhaps more important, the years of Dreyfusard activism institutionalized, for many in France, the notion that antisemitism was a distinct evil that there was an absolute duty to oppose — everywhere, all the time. Therefore, when Schwartzbard came along, they had to stand up against pogroms. (The defense, remember, had already converted the trial into a trial of pogroms, not of a man.)
Indeed, the Dreyfusards transfigured the fight against antisemitism into a fight to defend the Republic — and Republicanism. The fight became symbolically enshrined in the official Republican creed when the ashes of leading Dreyfusard and “J’accuse” author Emile Zola were laid to rest in the Panthéon in 1908. Thus, at the very end of Schwartzbard’s trial, Torrès could successfully implore the jury, “You are today, gentlemen, responsible for the prestige of our nation and the thousands of human lives that will depend on the verdict of France.”
France’s Dreyfusard legacy is not dead. True, there are still antisemites in France — including a representation of right-wing French Catholics, along with the angry Muslims. But France also deserves credit for tolerance. France’s Jews are well-integrated into the fabric of French society, and for all the news of anti-Jewish attacks, there are also considerable well-springs of good will, rooted in the very essence of the French Republican tradition. In 1791, the French revolutionaries made their country the first in Europe to grant equal rights and the franchise to its Jewish population. Indeed, among the reasons that many French Jews returned after World War II and that many Jews still love France today is that they know that the best of human impulses can be found there, and not only the worst.
Deborah Waroff is a New York-based writer. She is completing a biography of Sholom Schwartzbard.
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Yiddish Glory resounds in China and Korea
די שאַפֿער פֿונעם מוזיקאַלישן פּראָיעקט „ייִדיש גלאָרי‟ — דער מוזיקער פּסוי קאָראָלענקאָ און די ייִדיש־פֿאָרשערין אַנאַ שטערנשיס — האָבן לעצטנס זיך אומגעקערט פֿון זייערע ערשטע אַזיאַטישע גאַסטראָלן איבער כינע און דרום־קאָרעע.
צום ערשטן מאָל האָט אַ ברייטער עולם אין אָט די לענדער דערהערט אַ גאַנצע ריי חורבן־לידער אויף ייִדיש, אַרײַנגערעכנט גאָר זעלטענע, וועלכע זענען אין קיין אַלבאָם נאָך נישט אַרײַן: למשל, די קופּלעטן „אַדאָלף היטלער – ברוינער המן‟. אין אַן אַנדער ליד ברענגט מען אַ קאַטיושע היטלערן פֿאַר אַ כּלה.
אַנאַ שטערנשיס האָט בעת אַ שמועס מיט מיר דערקלערט, אַז דער פּראָיעקט „ייִדיש גלאָרי‟ נעמט אַרום גאָר אַ סך לידער, בערך 260–300 פֿון משה בערעגאָווסקיס ריזיקן אַרכיוו, געזאַמלט בשעת דער צווייטער וועלט־מלחמה אָדער באַלד נאָך איר סוף. בלויז אַ קליינעם טייל פֿון די דאָזיקע אוצרות האָט מען שוין וווּנדערלעך אויסגעשפּילט אין זייער ערשטן אַלבאָם „די פֿאַרלוירענע לידער פֿון דער צווייטער וועלט־מלחמה‟, וועלכער איז אַרויס אין 2018 און נאָמינירט געוואָרן פֿאַר אַ „גראַמי־פּרעמיע‟ (די אָנגעזעענע פּריזן פֿאַר מוזיק), און אינעם צווייטן אַלבאָם, „די פֿאַרשוויגענע לידער‟, וואָס איז אַרויס אין מאַרץ 2026.
בסך־הכּל, זענען זיי בשותּפֿות אויפֿגעטראָטן מיט זעקס לעקציע־קאָנצערטן: פֿאַר יעדן ליד, וואָס קאָראָלענקאָ האָט אויסגעזונגען, זיך באַגלייטנדיק אויף דער פּיאַנע, האָט שטערנשיס דאָס ליד דערקלערט אויף ענגליש. דער עולם האָט אויך געקענט לייענען די איבערזעצונגען פֿון די לידער אויף אַן עקראַן. אַחוץ דעם, האָט די פּראָפֿעסאָרין אויפֿגעטראָטן מיט צוויי אייגענע רעפֿעראַטן.
איין לעקציע־קאָנצערט איז פֿאָרגעקומען אינעם קאָרעיִש־ישׂראלדיקן ביבלישן אינסטיטוט – אַ קריסטלעכע געזעלשאַפֿט, וואָס געפֿינט זיך אין דער שטאָט פּאַדזשו לעבן סעול. דער פֿאַרזאַמלטער עולם, ווי שטערנשיס האָט איבערגעגעבן, איז כּמעט דורכאויס באַשטאַנען פֿון פּאַסטאָרן. די קאָרעער האָט באַזונדערט גערירט די טעמע פֿון צעריסענע משפּחות, ווײַל בײַ אַ סך פֿון זיי זענען קרובֿים געבליבן אָפּגעריסן אין אַן אַנדער לאַנד – צפֿון־קאָרעע.
אינעם שאַנכײַער אינטערנאַציאָנאַלן אוניווערסיטעט זענען שטערנשיס און קאָרעלענקאָ אויפֿגעטראָטן מיט צוויי לעקציע־קאָנצערטן: וועגן די ייִדישע לידער פֿון געטאָ און וועגן הומאָר – אויפֿן סמך פֿונעם זעלבן אַרכיוו „ייִדיש גלאָרי‟. אַזאַ טעמע איז באַזונדערס שווער צו דערקלערן אַן עולם, וואָס פֿאַרשטייט נישט קיין ייִדיש און ווייסט נישט, אַז אַפֿילו אין די ערגסטע צײַטן פֿון רציחה און טויט, האָבן ייִדן ווײַטער געפֿונען כּוח זיך צו וויצלען אָדער נאָך מער – געשעפּט כּוחות און האָפֿענונגען פֿונעם הומאָר.
נאָך איין לעקציע־קאָנצערט איז פֿאָרגעקומען אינעם שאַנכײַער מוזיי פֿון ייִדישע פּליטים, געווימדעט די לעבנס פֿון בערך 23 טויזנט ייִדן, וועלכע האָבן זיך געראַטעוועט פֿון די נאַציס אין שאַנכײַ.
אינעם כינעזישן אוניווערסיטעט פֿון האָנג־קאָנג איז פֿאָרגעקומען נאָך אַ קאָנצערט און דערנאָך האָט אַנאַ שטערנשיס אַליין דורכגעפֿירט אַ סעמינאַר וועגן מוזיק און גוואַלד, ווי אויך אַ לעקציע אינעם האָנג־קאָנגער ייִדישן קהילה־צענטער. אַחרון אַחרון חבֿיבֿ, זענען שטערנשיס און קאָראָלענקאָ אויפֿגעטראָטן אין ביידזשין; דאָס איז געווען אַ בשותּפֿותדיקע אונטערנעמונג פֿון דער שטאָטישער ייִדישער קהילה און סטודענטן פֿונעם פּעקינער אוניערסיטעט.
שטערנשיס האָט באַמערקט, אַז די כינעזער האָט באַזונדערס פֿאַרחידושט דער פֿאַקט, וואָס משה בערעגאָווסקי איז פֿאַרמישפּט געוואָרן אויף 10 יאָר סטאַלינס לאַגערן בלויז פֿאַרן זאַמלען פֿאָלקסלידער. פֿאַרשטייט זיך, זענען געווען אַ סך פֿראַגעס וועגן דער ייִדישע מוזיקאַלישער טראַדיציע און אירע וואָרצלען. „צי זענט איר אַליין ייִדן?‟ האָט מען זיי כּסדר געפֿרעגט.
דאָס איז נישט קיין איבעריקע קשיא. הײַנט טרעפֿן זיך אין כינע מענטשן, וועלכע שטודירן ייִדיש, נישט האָבנדיק קיין ייִדישע וואָרצלען. אין 2015 האָט דער פֿאָרווערטס דערציילט וועגן דער יונגער כינעזישער סטודענטקע יאַנג מענג, וועלכע האָט צום ערשטן מאָל איבערגעזעצט אַ קלאַסיש כינעזיש ליד אויף ייִדיש. שפּעטער, מיט עטלעכע יאָר צוריק, האָט זי געפֿירט ייִדיש־לימודים אינעם פּעקינער אוניווערסיטעט, און איצט פֿירט זי אָן מיטן קורס „די ייִדישע ציוויליזאַציע‟. פּונקט זי, צוזאַמען מיט דער אָרטיקער ייִדישער קהילה־פֿירערין ראָבערטאַ ליפּסאָן, האָט אָרגאַניזירט דעם אויפֿטריט פֿון קאָראָלענקאָ און שטערנשיס אין ביידזשין.
קאָראָלענקאָ האָט מיר דערציילט וועגן זײַן נסיעה אויף ייִדיש. ער האָט איבערגעגעבן, אַז דער אינסטיטוט אין פּאַדזשו איז פֿאַקטיש אַ מין פּראָטעסטאַנטישער קלויסטער, וועלכער האָט אויסגעבויט דעם ערשטן און איינציקן חורבן־מוזיי אין קאָרעע. נאָכן קאָנצערט האָט מען זיי געבראַכט אינעם מוזיי פֿון דער קאָרעיִשער מלחמה, וווּ מע האָט זיי געוויזן פֿאָטאָגראַפֿיעס פֿון אַמעריקאַנער ייִדישע סאָלדאַטן.
אין שאַנכײַ האָט זייערע צוויי אונטערנעמונגען אָרגאַניזירט די פּראָפֿעסאָרין אַנרואָ באַאָ, אַ לערערין פֿון ייִדיש־ליטעראַטור. זי פֿירט אַ קורס וועגן מענדעלע, פּרץ, באַשעוויס און בערגעלסאָן. אויף אַלע קאָנצערטן, האָט קאָראָלענקאָ באַמערקט, זענען אַ סך צוהערער געווען כינעזישע סטודענטן, וואָס לערנען זיך ייִדיש. אַ טייל פֿון די כינעזישע ליבהאָבער פֿון ייִדיש האָבן אים געזאָגט אַז מאַאָ האָט שטאַרק ליב געהאַט שלום־עליכמען. ס׳איז טאַקע אמת, אַז אין מאַאָס צײַטן זענען אַ צאָל ווערק זײַנע פּובליקירט געוואָרן אויף כינעזיש — מסתּמא ווײַל שלום־עליכם האָט מיט וואַרעמקייט געשילדערט פּשוטע אָרעמע לײַט.
נאָך אַ טשיקאַוועס: דער קאָנצערט אין ביידזשין האָט זיך געשלאָסן מיטן קאָלעקטיוון זינגען „לאָמיר אַלע אין איינעם‟. דערנאָך האָט איינער אַ קהילה־מיטגליד אָנגעהויבן זינגען דניאל קאַנס ווערסיע פֿונעם ליד „אוי, איר נאַרישע ציוניסטן‟, וואָס שטאַמט אויך פֿון בערעגאָווסקיס אַרכיוו. „נו, האָב איך אַוודאי מיטגעזונגען‟, האָט פּסוי קאָראָלענקאָ געזאָגט.
ער האָט צוגעגעבן, אַז זייערע גאַסטראָלן האָבן אַרויסגערופֿן אַ גרויסן אינטערעס בײַ דער כינעזישער מעדיאַ. אי יאַנג מענגס סטודענטן נאָכן ביידזשינער קאָנצערט, אי די צײַטונג „מינג פּאַאָ‟ האָבן אים געפֿרעגט: וואָס האָט אים מאָטיווירט זיך אויסצולערנען ייִדיש? האָט קאָראָלענקאָ געענטפֿערט, אַז אַ סך סאָוועטישע קינדער־לידער, מיט וועלכע ער איז אויפֿגעוואַקסן ווי אַ קינד, זענען טיף פֿאַרבונדן מיט דער ייִדישער פֿאָלקסמוזיק. ווען אין בערעגאָווסקיס אַרכיוו זענען נישט געווען קיין נאָטן, האָט די סאָוועטישע פּאָפּולערע קולטור באַגײַסטערט אים צו שאַפֿן נײַע ייִדישלעכע מעלאָדיעס.
דאָס איז טאַקע גאָר אַ ברייטע טעמע פֿאַר פֿאָרשונגען און חידושים; למשל, דער באַקאַנטער ייִדישער קאָמפּאָזיטאָר משה ווײַנבערג האָט געשאַפֿן די מוזיק פֿאַר צענדליקער סאָוועטישע קינדער־פֿילמען און אַנימאַציעס. בײַ אַ ריי אַנדערע סאָוועטישע קינדער־קאָמפּאָזיטאָרן איז דאָס מאַמע־לשון אויך געווען ייִדיש.
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