By the time the children began singing in Yiddish on their own at a playground in Rio de Janeiro, Sonia Kramer realized something important had changed.

The songs were not part of a formal lesson. No teacher had prompted them. The children — classmates from a Jewish day school — simply started singing melodies they had learned in workshops organized by Viver com Yiddish (“Living for Yiddish”), the educational and cultural initiative Kramer founded a decade ago.

“For me, that was the moment the language felt truly alive,” she said. “Maybe later they will forget some of it. Maybe not. But at that moment, the songs became part of their memory.”

In Brazil, where Yiddish disappeared from Jewish day schools by the early 2000s (they used to teach the language once or twice a week), such moments are rare enough to feel historic.

Kramer, an emeritus professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio) and a daughter of an Auschwitz survivor from Ostrowiec, Poland, doesn’t describe what’s happening as a “revival.” The word feels too grand for Rio’s context. There are no Yiddish-speaking neighborhoods anymore, no immersion schools, no daily life conducted in the language.

Something else, though, is emerging: a cultural rediscovery led through music, literature and children’s education. Yiddish is circulating again — at shows, at parties, in university classrooms. It’s not yet a revival, but Yiddish is undeniably alive.

“We skipped a generation,” Kramer said. “The immigrants wanted their children to learn Portuguese. Yiddish reminded many people of sorrow and survival. But now we are beginning to value what was created in that language — the literature, the songs, the poetry, the theater, the cinema.”

A spark that grew into a program

The roots of Viver com Yiddish reach back to 2016, when Kramer attended the annual Yiddish immersion retreat, Yiddish Vokh.

“For the first time in my life, I was in a place where 150 people were speaking and singing in Yiddish — every day, all week,” she recalled. “Not as nostalgia. As a language that is alive.” One day at the event, an educator familiar with Kramer’s work in childhood education encouraged her to create Yiddish workshops for children in Brazil.

Back in Rio, Kramer approached several progressive Jewish schools with a proposal: Not traditional language instruction, but cultural workshops built around shmuesn (daily conversation), Yiddish songs, stories, games and children’s literature. One school, Escola Eliezer Max, agreed to join the project.

Today, the initiative encompasses university classes, research projects, a musical ensemble and workshops that reach 400 to 500 children annually.

Some of the educators came through those university courses. Alice Fucs began studying Yiddish through Kramer’s courses at PUC-Rio and has taught in the children’s workshops ever since.

“I started studying Yiddish in 2020 and soon realized I would never stop,” she said. “It connected me with my family’s past and opened up a new and amazing world. The workshops with the children are both a chance to pass on what I’ve already learned and a chance to learn more every month.”

Teaching has its own challenges. “Some of the children find it hard to grasp a language that isn’t tied to a country,” Fucs said. “We bring in contemporary Yiddish work to try to build that bridge.”

The workshops run once a month, preschool through fifth grade — far from enough to create fluency. But fluency isn’t the immediate goal.

“Our first objective was to create an emotional memory,” she said. “Positive feelings connected to Yiddish.”

 

Teaching a language that “disappeared”

A couple of years ago, one encounter crystallized the challenge: During a workshop, a 10-year-old boy told the teachers that learning Yiddish was pointless.

“My parents told me not to pay attention to this,” he said. “The language disappeared from the world.”

The comment deeply affected the workshop educators who decided to respond not with argument, but with evidence.

A month later, they returned carrying a large bag of Yiddish children’s books; many bilingual.

The children protested immediately.

“But we can’t read Yiddish,” they told her.

“You can read some of it,” Kramer replied.

Kramer showed them Yiddish interviews produced by the Yiddish Book Center and Yiddish music clips performed abroad, explaining that the language is alive in many countries. The children seemed impressed.

For Kramer, moments like this counter a familiar misconception: that Yiddish belongs only to the past, or that it was merely a “dialect.”

“People still say that it’s not really a language, then you have to explain: No, it has literature, poetry, theater, philosophy. It developed across centuries.”

 

Growing seeds through music and stories

The workshops at Eliezer Max begin with four-year-olds. Meeting only once a month, teaching grammar isn’t the goal. Instead, the project meets children where they already are: in songs and stories. Before launching the workshops, Kramer noticed that Yiddish songs had virtually vanished from Rio’s Jewish schools. “In my childhood, Yiddish music was everywhere,” she said. “And suddenly there was nothing.”

So the workshops focus on repertoire: songs, stories, emotional connection. Teachers explain who wrote the lyrics, introducing children to Yiddish poets and writers. “What is extraordinary in Yiddish culture,” Kramer said, “is how deeply literature lives inside the music.”

The approach resonates. The school coordinator now includes Yiddish songs at school events, alongside the Portuguese, Hebrew, and English repertoire. Music teachers prepare children to perform them; families hear the music at holiday celebrations; classroom teachers incorporate elements into broader cultural programming.

Sometimes the songs travel home. “Is there a greater fargenign (joy) than receiving a video of my 12-year-old granddaughter and 9-year-old grandson spontaneously singing Tumbalalaika before bed?” said Sonia Tucherman, grandmother of two children in the workshops. “It was a seed planted by my grandparents, and I see it bearing fruit in my grandchildren.”

Still, the program’s reach has clear limits. Yiddish isn’t part of the school’s curriculum — the workshops sit alongside it, not within it. They end at fifth grade, which means older children often drift from the songs they once knew. And one meeting a month, said Kramer, isn’t enough to anchor a language.

 

Building something to last

For all that it has built, Viver com Yiddish still rests on a fragile structure.

Most of the educators and musicians involved work multiple jobs. Much of the organizational labor — translating materials, adapting books, preparing lessons — falls to volunteers. Kramer herself works largely as a volunteer, but that arrangement isn’t sustainable for the younger teachers and musicians who built the project into what it is.

Viver com Yiddish’s current fundraising campaign aims to train a new generation of Yiddish educators and create paid positions to coordinate educational materials and programming.

“You cannot sustain this on passion alone,” Kramer said. “We have to train the next generation, and give the people already doing this work the conditions to continue.”

“We’re trying to bring back a language and a culture considered lost by our generation, and pass it to another generation,” she said. “That feels deeply Jewish to me: taking something from the past and carrying it into the future.”

The post Why children in Rio de Janeiro are singing in Yiddish appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) — A huge fire broke out Tuesday morning at the Kosher Kingdom supermarket in Golders Green, London’s heavily Orthodox Jewish neighborhood. Firefighters were still working to put out the blaze six hours later.

Metropolitan Police posted on X that officers were called to the scene on Golders Green Road around 7 a.m. by the London Fire Brigade. “Officers responded and are at the scene assisting firefighters with road closures and evacuations,” said police.

London Fire Brigade Assistant Commissioner Craig Carter provided an update on the scene at 12:30 p.m., saying that 15 engines and around 100 firefighters “have been tackling the fire at its height, which has affected a ground floor shop and a storage area to the rear, which has partially collapsed.”

He noted that the flats above were not affected but residents were evacuated as a precaution.

“Our specialist Fire Investigators, in conjunction with the Metropolitan Police Service, have worked at pace to establish that the circumstances of the fire are not believed to be suspicious and investigations on the cause and origin of the fire are ongoing,” Carter added.

The news that Kosher Kingdom did not appear to be deliberately targeted comes as a relief to Jewish residents, who have been on edge for months amid a string of attacks. The blaze broke out in the same area where four Hatzola ambulances were torched in March, two Jewish men were stabbed in April and a Jewish man said he was attacked for speaking Hebrew this month.

Rochel Cohen, who lives near the supermarket, is among those whose street has been cordoned off. Her first thought was the incident was another antisemitic attack, she told JTA in a phone interview.

Cohen said she looked out the window around 7 a.m. and saw “just huge plumes of black smoke and we heard all the sirens. And the police have roped off all our roads again.”

That “again,” Cohen said, was because it was the third time in two months that her family had witnessed “crime scenes in our neighborhood.”

“The ambulance fire was just on the next street from us and the stabbing situation was 100 meters down the road from us,” she said.

Prior to the fire department’s update, speculation spread on social media that the fire was electrical, potentially caused by faulty freezers. London has seen an unprecedented heatwave over the last several days, with temperatures soaring over 90 degrees.

Cohen said two of her family members previously worked at Kosher Kingdom. They believed from the outset that there was an electrical fire in the freezers “because it’s exactly from the roof footage that we saw where those freezers are located,” she said.

Nonetheless, another incident in the neighborhood has left her shaken. “It’s just a bit of a nightmare, really,” she said. “It’s all these incidents adding up, and it makes it quite scary, this climate of fear we’re currently in. It’s really oppressive.”

Cohen said she has been traveling to jury service the last several weeks about 10 miles from Golders Green in Wood Green, which has a higher than average crime rate.

“I actually felt safer there than I do walking the street here in Golders Green because I’m constantly turning around, checking what’s going on,” she said. “It’s not a nice feeling.”

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

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When I was a kid, I was haunted by the threat of my parents rejecting me if I married a non-Jew. Raised on Disney movies and song lyrics about soulmates, I spent almost every moment of high school anticipating the pain of falling in love with a non-Jew and having to choose between him and my family. If I chose him, the estrangement could bode poorly for married life. But if I married a Jewish man, I’d always worry that if he had not been Jewish, our love would not have overcome our religious differences, and therefore was not that strong to begin with.

The psychic burden began to lift only when I went to college at Hunter in New York City and made friends from other minority groups. I bonded with them over our parents’ desire that we marry someone from the same religion or ethnicity. I had always felt like my parents’ demand constituted bigotry against non-Jews, and I was surprised when my non-Jewish friends were more sympathetic to their stance than I was.

In college, I took a class on the history of modern India and learned about the Pakistani author Bapsi Sidhwa, but I didn’t read her until this year. Sidhwa, who died in 2024, grew up in Lahore’s Parsi community — a group of Zoroastrians who trace their roots to pre-Islamic Iran. Even though her books are mostly more than 30 years old, they still feel relevant, and they remind me of my own Iranian Jewish community.

Sidhwa’s 1993 coming-of-age novel An American Brat centers on Feroza, a Parsi girl from Lahore. Feroza’s parents send her to the U.S. to expand her horizons because they think the local culture is making her too conservative. But they wind up being disappointed when her horizons expand too much.

Feroza’s whole extended family goes into a tailspin when she sends word home that she wants to marry a Jewish man named David. She met him when she responded to an ad he placed in the college newspaper about selling his car. The two bond over their families’ shared emphases on religion and education. David’s family’s Shabbat candles recall the significance of fire within Zoroastrianism. But if Feroza marries a non-Zoroastrian, she will be excommunicated from the Parsi community. As Feroza’s mom Zareen prepares to fly to America to intervene, extended family members urge her to stand her ground no matter how nice David is and no matter how big a “tantrum” Feroza throws — but they also advise her not be too harsh either, so as not to push Feroza away.

The reader never learns what objections, if any, David’s Reform Jewish parents might have to his interfaith marriage; over Shabbat dinner, prior to the proposal, they are reserved but polite. Meanwhile, Zareen’s good-cop bad-cop routine is familiar, quaint and pathetic. She lists eligible Parsi bachelors (the Zoroastrian equivalent of ‘nice Jewish boys’) with promising careers and “worthy mothers.” She tries killing with kindness: “You’re too precious. We’re not going to throw you away on the first riffraff that comes your way.” She even tells Feroza cautionary tales about women who married “nons” (Zoroastrian equivalent of goyim) and wound up feeling disconnected from their heritage. These methods all fail, and the book comes to a sobering end when Zareen calls David’s bluff and demands the couple have a huge traditional wedding, scaring him off and exposing the limits of his supposedly liberal values.

Zoroastrians, like Jews, are a small group. In 2022, an Associated Press article estimated the worldwide Zoroastrian population, which at its peak numbered in the millions, was now around 125,000. Lahore’s Parsi community had all of 11 members as of a 2023 Facebook post.

Reading literature from other cultures, just like having friends from other cultures, can teach us about our own. As I read Zareen’s efforts to talk Feroza out of the engagement, it was somehow easier for me to understand than if they were Jewish like me. The author’s empathy makes Zareen’s mom an especially interesting character, like a Zoroastrian Tevye, torn between family pressures and the feminist values that inspired her to send Feroza to the U.S. in the first place.

Students at Hunter have a reputation for being super liberal, but they also have surprising points of departure from what most people would consider liberal. When I told classmates that I struggled with my parents’ insistence that I marry a Jew, I sensed bad energy in the room, as if they were judging me for disrespecting my parents in front of them. Some seemed to think it’s only natural for a person to marry someone who belongs to the same religion or ethnicity. Part of me was disturbed to see that this brand of separatism was so fashionable — but I also felt relieved, like they’d given me permission to appease my parents.

Feroza heals from her breakup with David partly by remembering that no matter the religion of the person she marries, her religion will always be part of her. As for myself, I don’t know what my future holds. But whatever does happen, it will be something that also happened to countless women before me — not only Jewish women but people of all different races and creeds. It is comforting to remember that as your life is playing out, there are people all over the world and across time living out much the same story as you are.

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