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March comes in with a roar of new Yiddish music
(New York Jewish Week) — As they say in the mameloshn (mother tongue), “Dos Yidish lid iz umetum.” In other words, “Yiddish song is in the air.”
This month a collection of new Yiddish songs will be performed for the first time in America at a Manhattan museum; two Brooklyn blues musicians will release their recordings of old Yiddish folk songs and a new web site preserving the work of a couple who played a pivotal role in promoting Yiddish song is set to debut.
If all that weren’t enough, the stars of the Yiddish stage will also appear at an event celebrating the woman who was dubbed “the Sherlock Holmes of Yiddish song.”
“Because we all have this weird relationship with Yiddish, every project that people do takes it to a different place,” Alex Weiser, director of public programs at YIVO, told the New York Jewish Week. “Interesting, weird things are currently happening with Yiddish song.”
Read on for ways to get your Yiddish on.
Sister act
As part of Carnegie Hall’s multi-venue celebration of women in music, on Sunday, March 5, the Paul Shapiro Quartet takes the stage at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Battery Park to perform “Di Shvester: The Sisters.” The sisters (by another mother, anyway) in this concert of Jewish and Yiddish music are Eleanor Reissa, the singer/director/actress who is fluent in Yiddish, and Cilla Owens, the superb jazz vocalist who teaches at Hunter College and can sing in Yiddish as well.
Reissa and Owens will perform some songs by the Barry Sisters, the Bronx-born trio of the mid-20th century who brought Yiddish songs into the mainstream. One of the songs they will perform is based on a poem by the Yiddish poet Aliza Greenblatt, aka Woody Guthrie’s mother-in-law. In a cross-genre segue, Reissa and Owens will follow “Zumer Bay Nakht Oyf Dekher” (“Summer At Night On The Roof”) with “Up On the Roof,” the Carole King/Gerry Goffin sung memorably by Laura Nyro.
Shapiro, whose albums for John Zorn’s Radical Jewish Culture series were critically acclaimed, has worked with Owens, who has spent most of her life in Crown Heights, since 1990. Shapiro first started collaborating with Reissa, who grew up in Brownsville, at Yiddish New York in 2017.
“To me they’re both Brooklyn royalty,” said Shapiro, who hangs his fedora in the Lower East Side’s Grand Street Co-ops.
“When I sing with Cilla, I feel like I’m home,” Reissa said
The two vocalists have appeared together several times in Shapiro’s Ribs and Brisket Revue, which began at the now-shuttered Cornelia Street Café.
Percussionist Ricky Gordon, right, and Jeremiah Lockwood, the front man for The Sway Machinery, form the duet Gordon Lockwood. (Courtesy)
A right to sing the blues
For the entire month of March a free five-song EP titled “Once Upon a Time the Fire Burned Brighter: Ballads from the Yiddish Gothic” is available for download. Created by the Brooklyn-based blues performers Gordon Lockwood, these are re-interpretations of Yiddish folk songs, three of them by Lifshe Schaecter Widman, a Yiddish folksinger who begot the Yiddish poet Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman, who begot the Yiddish scholar and former newspaper editor Itzik Gottesman, now a senior lecturer in Yiddish language and culture at the University of Texas at Austin whose Yiddish Song of the Week blog is an important source for lovers of Yiddish song.
The EP will be accompanied by videos of the five songs, plus additional multimedia that will be viewable online. Gordon Lockwood may sound like a Canadian folk singer, but it is actually a duo comprised of percussionist Ricky Gordon, who performs with Wynton Marsalis and has collaborated with Spike Lee, and Jeremiah Lockwood, the front man for The Sway Machinery, a brass-heavy world music band. Lockwood, a card-carrying ethnomusicologist with a PhD from Stanford, recently produced an album of music that features several Hasidic cantors from Brooklyn. In April, Gordon Lockwood will perform their “Once Upon A Time” repertoire in New Haven and New York.
Yiddish royalty
On March 23, the life of Chana Mlotek — the late, great musicologist, folklorist and archivist, who curated the Yiddish music collection at the vaunted YIVO archives — will be celebrated at YIVO’s West 16th St. headquarters. Nine descendants of the Mlotek clan will participate, along with actors Reissa and Steven Skybell, who played Tevye in the Yiddish production of “Fiddler On The Roof.”
Singers will include Lorin Sklamberg of The Klezmatics and Sarah Gordon of the Brooklyn Yiddish rock band Yiddish Princess. Gordon is the daughter of the late Adrienne Cooper, often referred to as the “mother of the Yiddish revival.” The evening’s musical director will be Zalmen Mlotek, Chana and Yosl’s son and artistic director of the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene.
On March 20, the Workers Circle is expected to launch The Yosl and Chana Mlotek Collection of Yiddish Song, a website that turns the Mloteks’ three-volume “Pearls of Yiddish Song” anthology into a searchable multimedia resource. Consisting of more than 400 Yiddish songs, the web site will include content curated from YouTube and TikTok, according to an email from the publicist.
The Mlotek collection adds another important resource to a field that includes YIVO’s collection of 4,000-plus Yiddish songs, a project directed by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and featuring the field recordings of the late musicologist Ruth Rubin, and many in the Yiddish song scene are looking forward to it.
“We’ve been waiting for this for many, many years,” said Linda Gritz, a retired molecular biologist active in the monthly sing at the Workers Circle in Brookline, Massachusetts. The group has been meeting online during the pandemic and unable to use the couple dozen copies of each Mlotek book, so it has had to create PDFs of 30 songs for its monthly virtual gatherings.
“When it’s online, people could request any song from any book and we could put the URL in the chat and go to it,” said Gritz. “That’ll be an amazing resource.”
Songs for and about refugees
On March 26, “Pleytem Tsuzamen” (“Refugees Together”) will be performed at the Museum of Jewish Heritage-A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. Two performances of Josh Waletzky’s Yiddish song cycle will mark the American debut of the work, which was first performed in 2019 at the Weimar Republic of Yiddishland gathering in Germany. Performers will come from Latvia, Germany, England and Canada, and Brooklyn violinists Jake Shulman-Ment and Deborah Strauss are part of the cast.
“It’s fitting that we’re doing it a couple of weeks before Pesach [Passover] because there’s a Pesach theme that goes through a lot of the songs,” said singer Daniel Kahn, who lives on a houseboat in Hamburg and plays accordion in the production. “It’s incredible how prescient and universal Josh’s song cycle has proven to be…. Those songs and their themes of displacement and upheaval resonate with the liberational traditions within Yiddishkayt [secular Yiddish culture] and Jewish practice.”
English and Ukrainian supertitles will make the two-hour concert, co-sponsored by National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, accessible to non-Yiddish speakers.
—
The post March comes in with a roar of new Yiddish music appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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I’m an Orthodox student in NYC. I’m grateful Mamdani vetoed the school buffer bill
My classmates at Manhattan’s Hunter College regularly gather to protest in a plaza at the southwest corner of East 68th Street and Lexington Avenue. This winter, that intersection hosted many protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement — protests that felt more urgent because, for many Hunter students and their family members, detainment and deportation are very real threats.
Seeing how committed my classmates were to fighting back against injustice made me proud to be a New Yorker, and a student at Hunter.
Detractors often portray college protesters as liberal elites, comfortably removed from real-world issues. That’s not the case at Hunter. That’s part of why, as an Orthodox Jew deeply involved with Jewish life on campus, I’m glad that Mayor Zohran Mamdani vetoed a bill that would have established security perimeters disallowing protests near educational facilities.
On campus, there has been much discussion around City Council Intro 175-B, which the council passed by a 30-19 vote in March. Students suspect that these policies are in place not to protect us but rather to shield the Israeli government from criticism. Internal discussion among Jewish students has been varied. Some students say the bill is necessary to protect us, while others agree with the progressive views of a majority of Hunter’s politically active students, and want their voices to be heard.
Either way, Jewish students are not a monolith, and I am distrustful of politicians and bills which claim to speak for all Jews as a bloc.
I proudly wear a kippah and tzitzis to campus every single day. Friends jokingly call my accent a “generic northeastern yeshivish,” interspersed with Aramaic and Hebrew terms. Before you know my name, you know I’m a Jew. And I feel complete confidence in saying that Hunter is a good place to be Jewish.
My non-Jewish friends and professors have respected my identity and perspective. That isn’t to say that protests related to Israel and the Gaza war haven’t been contentious or charged: they have been. But when I pass my friends who wear kaffiyeh in protest of the destruction in Gaza, they still dap me up.
That image — of a kippah-wearing Jew and a kaffiyeh-clad Arab student greeting in the hallway — encapsulates my experience at Hunter.
Yes, some protesters have crossed lines. At a protest during my freshman year, a protester displayed a banner with an AK-47 and red block letters saying: “BRING THE WAR HOME.” I thought the goal was ending wars abroad, not bringing them home. I was appalled, as were many other students across the political spectrum.
But I believe it’s the responsibility of New York City’s colleges and universities, relying on the input of their students, to address these issues. They can make informed decisions about which applications to approve or deny, take their own safety measures, and, as a last resort, oversee necessary disciplinary action.
Hunter is capable of promoting free expression and dialogue, along with security measures to protect students when necessary. There’s nothing to gain from imposing heavy-handed restrictions on my university and my classmates that would suppress their speech. And there’s much to lose.
Hunter is a bastion of free thought, somewhere my classmates and I can immerse ourselves in different perspectives, and learn through dialogue and debate. It’s somewhere you can espouse unpopular opinions, as long as you have the ability to defend your argument.
Notably, 175-B — which still may be passed, as the council has launched an effort to overturn Mamdani’s veto — contains a carveout for labor protests, allowing these protests to move inside security barriers. I agree that these protests should continue unencumbered by barriers or buffer zones on our campuses. But I don’t see why they should be the only ones. Encountering ideas that differ from your own should be thought-provoking, even thrilling. It should be what college is all about.
So when people back home on Long Island ask me how I’m dealing with antisemitism at Hunter, my answer is another question: “Do you mean anti-Zionism or antisemitism?”
Many Hunter students are staunch or outspoken anti-Zionists, opposing Israel’s right to exist. That perspective is challenging for students with a deep attachment to the Jewish state. It took several difficult conversations with honest and principled anti-Zionists before I began to understand that their logic and perspective is as informed as any other.
In my experience, anti-Zionism and antisemitism are not the same. My peers are entitled to their First Amendment rights, and when they exercise them, everyone benefits in the long run. Engaging outlooks that make us uncomfortable is the best way to learn and grow. I’d rather speak with my classmates face to face than confine their ideas to the perimeter of a buffer zone.
Antisemitism is an extremely dangerous issue in New York City, and Jews in America are rightfully on high alert. But a policy platform of censoring free speech will not disincentivize rogue incidents of hate violence. Those are the most imminent physical threat to American Jews, and I have done my best to make sure Hunter’s social justice community understands that. This line of open communication is what keeps Jews safe at Hunter, and 175-B threatened to sever it.
The NYPD told the City Council in February that its existing authority is enough to handle protests. 175-B went beyond that authority, erecting barriers with the stated goal of protecting Jewish students like me. But as a Jewish student, I believe they would have violated the First Amendment rights of all students — Jewish and non-Jewish alike. The bill, rather than creating new security for students like me, seemed poised to isolate the Jewish community: no one wants to debate someone whom they see, fairly or not, as participating in the restriction of their rights.
And truthfully, I have experienced far more antisemitism on the streets and subways of New York than I ever have on Hunter’s campus. It is no small thing that I am safe at Hunter, and I would speak out if I was not.
With this veto, the mayor recognized that our community and our city did not need this crackdown on expression. We need the opposite. The United States, and New York in particular, have been a haven for Jewish life and culture for more than a century. Our community will never achieve safety and security by allying ourselves with those who treat civil and constitutional rights as dispensable.
I don’t always agree with everything protesters have to say, but it isn’t my place, or the City Council’s, to legislate where and how they say them.
I don’t want to see roadblocks or barriers on 68th and Lexington. I want to see Hunter students exercising their right — and fulfilling their duty — to speak out against injustice and tyranny. I salute Mamdani’s decision to veto City Council Intro 175-B. It would have cost more in freedom than it could ever provide in safety.
The post I’m an Orthodox student in NYC. I’m grateful Mamdani vetoed the school buffer bill appeared first on The Forward.
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Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s selection as JTS commencement speaker roils graduating class
The selection of Israeli President Isaac Herzog as the Jewish Theological Seminary’s commencement speaker has divided undergraduates at the school, with several seniors and dozens of other current students and alumni signing a letter calling on the school’s chancellor to disinvite Herzog.
The letter accused Herzog of inciting violence against civilians in Gaza — a characterization shared by some human rights groups — and criticized him for not taking action against settler violence in the West Bank.
The students added that Herzog’s involvement in the schoolwide May 19 ceremony — when he will also receive an honorary degree from the seminary — would leave them “morally conflicted about attending.”
“There are many places for members of the JTS community to engage with difficult ideas in nuanced conversation,” they wrote, “but we believe the commencement stage is not the place to engage with such a particularly divisive figure.”
The letter leaked to Chancellor Shuly Rubin Schwartz before it was finalized, according to two of the six seniors who signed it, leading to a meeting during which Rubin Schwartz took issue with the group’s approach and held firm on the decision.
Meanwhile, other JTS seniors affirming the speaker choice wrote a letter of their own that has gathered 24 signatures, representing roughly half of the senior class.
The controversy unfolded amid ongoing tensions around Israel in Conservative Jewish spaces and at Columbia University, which has a joint undergraduate program with JTS. The flagship academic institution of the Conservative movement, JTS includes in its mission deepening students’ connection to Israel, and requires its rabbinical students to spend a year learning there.
Speaking out
Herzog has faced criticism for comments he made after the Oct. 7 attacks, in which he said that it was “an entire nation” that was responsible. Some said the remark carried an implication that there were no innocent civilians in Gaza. (Herzog later said it had been taken out of context and that he did believe there were innocent Palestinians there.)
The Forward has reached out to Herzog’s office for comment.
In an interview, one of the students who signed the letter, granted anonymity out of concern for professional repercussions, said he had wanted to fight back against a culture of silence around Palestinian suffering in the Jewish world.
“I do feel powerless,” the student said. “I feel like there’s a genocide happening. And the silence is killing all of us.”
Four current JTS rabbinical students signed the letter opposing Herzog, though none was in the class of 2026. JTS rabbinical students walk at the commencement ceremony but are ordained in a smaller gathering the next day.
Rubin Schwartz said in a statement that most of the JTS community was excited about Herzog’s address and honorary degree, but that it welcomed “thoughtful discussion and differing opinions” from students, faculty and staff.
“President Herzog, like all 10 previous presidents of Israel, represents the state and its people, rather than its government,” Rubin Schwartz added. “We look forward to honoring him at this year’s ceremony.”
Gabriel Freedman-Naditch, who signed the second letter, said he had been happy to learn Herzog would be the commencement speaker. He applauded Herzog’s leadership during Israel’s judicial overhaul saga, but said the Israeli presidency was mostly a “figurehead” position anyway. And while he said he was not closely attuned to Herzog’s actions since Oct. 7, he was willing to countenance a speaker he did not perfectly align with.
“We’ve all learned to listen to people we disagree with,” Freedman-Naditch said. “We should be able to listen to people who we find upsetting.”
A messy rollout
The group of six seniors who wrote the anti-Herzog letter drafted and circulated it privately among select students and alumni, planning to share it with Rubin Schwartz in a private meeting only once it was finalized.
Then Freedman-Naditch, who had not been aware of the letter, was forwarded the letter by his mother, who had received it from a JTS graduate who had signed it. Freedman-Naditch then shared it with the senior class group chat, asking why they hadn’t all been made aware of it. The organizers replied that they were worried that the letter would be leaked along with their names.
Not long after, Rubin Schwartz requested permission through Google Documents to view the letter. The group then emailed the chancellor proposing a meeting to discuss it.
In her office Tuesday, Rubin Schwartz asked the group why they hadn’t first come to her directly, according to the two students who spoke with the Forward. They replied that the JTS administration doesn’t take seriously what undergraduate students have to say, and that voices that diverge from the pro-Israel consensus tend to be silenced.
“She was basically like, ‘It saddens me to hear you say that there isn’t a culture of dissent here,’” one of the students said. “But at the same time, she’s calling our letter of dissent a hostile act.”
“What I said was that their choice to send a letter, rather than speak directly with me or others, felt aggressive,” Rubin Schwartz said in an email. “My point was that it would have felt more respectful to have had a conversation about their feelings instead of initiating the letter campaign.”
Herzog is not the only figure from the realm of Israeli politics slated to address 2026 graduates. Yeshiva University announced Thursday its own commencement speaker: U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee.
The post Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s selection as JTS commencement speaker roils graduating class appeared first on The Forward.
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Playing with bows and arrows and other Lag BaOmer shtetl customs
עס קומט באַלד דער יום־טובֿ ל״ג־בעומר — דער 33סטער טאָג פֿון ציילן ספֿירה, די טעג צווישן פּסח און שבֿועות.
ל״ג־בעומר איז אַ טאָג פֿון פֿרייד אין מיטן פֿון זיבן וואָכן טרויער און ערנסטקייט. מע דריקט אויס די פֿרייד אויף פֿאַרשיידענע אופֿנים. דאָס ווערטל „אַ ל״ג־בעומר-גענעראַל איז נאָר אויף איין טאָג“ פֿאַררופֿט זיך אויפֿן מינהג, אין וועלכן חדר־ייִנגלעך פֿלעגן גיין אויף אַ שפּאַציר אין וואַלד מיטן מלמד, און שיסן פֿײַל־און־בויגנס (נישט קיין אמתע, נאָר שפּילעכלעך). איין חדר־ייִנגל האָט מען אויסגעקליבן צו זײַן דער גענעראַל איבער די „שלאַכטן“, וואָס האָבן נאָכגעמאַכט בר־כּוכבאס קאַמף קעגן די רוימער מיט צוויי טויזנט יאָר פֿריִער.
דעם בולטן מיליטאַריסטישן מינהג האָט מען אויסגעטײַטשט מיט אַ מער „ייִדישלעכן“ טעם — אַזוי ווי קיין רעגנבויגן האָט זיך נישט באַוויזן בעתן לעבן פֿון רב שמעון בר־יוחאי, אַ תּנא פֿון דער מישנה, דינט דער בויגן פֿונעם פֿײַל־און־בויגן ווי אַ דערמאָנונג נאָך זײַן טויט. ווי עס ווערט געזאָגט אינעם קבלה־ספֿר, דער „זוהר“, וואָס, לויט דער טראַדיציע, האָט בר־יוחאי מחבר געווען, וועט אַ רעגנבויגן מיט כּלערליי קאָלירן זיך באַווײַזן איידער דער משיח וועט קומען. האָט דער בויגן, במילא, אויך אַ טײַטש ווי אַ טייל פֿון אונדזער ייִדישער אמונה אין משיחן.
ל״ג־בעומר אינעם דאָרף מירון, נישט ווײַט פֿון צפֿת, פּראַוועט מען דעם יום־טובֿ מיט גרויס פּאַראַד; אַ מינהג, וואָס ציט זיך עטלעכע הונדערט יאָר צוריק און נעמט זיך פֿון דעם, וואָס רבֿ שמעון בר־יוחאיס קבֿר געפֿינט זיך דאָרטן. די געלערנטע האַלטן, אַז דעם „זוהר“ האָט מען ערשט אָנגעשריבן מיט אַ טויזנט יאָר שפּעטער. אין שפּאַניע, אינעם 13טן יאָרהונדערט, האָט זיך צום ערשטן מאָל באַוויזן דאָס ווערק, אַרויסגעגעבן פֿון משה דעלעאָן, אָבער דעלעאָן האָט דאָרטן געשריבן, אַז בר־יוחאי האָט עס געשאַפֿן — יוחאי האָט געקליבן די אַנטפּלעקונגען וואָס משה רבינו האָט באַקומען פֿונעם אייבערשטן און זיי געדרוקט אינעם „זוהר“.
גרשון שלום האָט געהאַלטן, אַז דעלעאָן האָט נישט נאָר אַרויסגעגעבן דעם „זוהר“, נאָר אים אויך אָנגעשריבן. ל״ג־בעומר הייסט אויך „חילולא דרבֿ שמעון בן־יוחאי“ און חילולא מיינט חתונה, מיטן מיין, אַז דער טויט פֿונעם גרויסן רבֿ האָט געבראַכט אַ שלומדיקע האַרמאָניע אין דער וועלט, וואָס מע קען געפֿינען אין זײַן „זוהר“. נישט אַלע רבנים זענען געווען צופֿרידן מיט דעם, וואָס מע הייבט אַרויס דעם „זוהר“ און זײַן מחבר אינעם טאָג פֿון ל״ג־בעומר. אָבער די פּאָפּולערע טראַדיציעס זענען געבליבן, אַזוי ווי צו שפּילן מוזיק בײַ זײַן קבֿר און אָפּשערן צום ערשטן מאָל די האָר פֿונעם קינד (בשעת ספֿירה ציילן טאָר מען נישט שערן די האָר.)
די ספֿרדישע ייִדן רופֿן דעם טאָג „ל״ג־לעומר“, נישט „בעומר“ און האָבן אַנדערע מינהגים ווי די אַשכּנזים. למשל, אין אַשכּנזישע פֿרומע קרײַזן טאָר מען נישט חתונה האָבן בשעת מע ציילט ספֿירה, אַ חוץ ל״ג־בעומר. אָבער בײַ די ספֿרדישע ייִדן מעג מען יאָ האָבן חתונה אין אַלע טעג פֿון ניסן נאָך פּסח; די סירישע ייִדן מעגן חתונה האָבן פֿון ל״ג־בעומר אָן ביז שבֿועות. ווען מע הייבט אָן צו ציילן עומר בײַ די ייִדן פֿון מאַראָקאָ באַקומט יעדער ייִד אין בית־הכּנסת אַ ביסל זאַלץ אין קעשענע, אַ דערמאָנונג צו ציילן ספֿירה, אָבער דאָס זאַלץ איז אויך אַ סגולה קעגן שלעכטס.
פֿון אַ פֿאָלקלאָריסטישן קוקווינקל קען מען באַטראַכטן אַ סך מינהגים מיט זאַלץ ווי אַ מיטל אַוועקצוטרײַבן בייזע רוחות — למשל, דאָס אײַנטונקען די חלה אין זאַלץ פֿרײַטיק־צו־נאַכטס. בײַ די מיזרח־אייראָפּעיִשע ייִדן האָט מען געוואָרפֿן זאַלץ אין די ווינקלען פֿון שטוב פּטור צו ווערן פֿון די נישט־גוטע, און מע האָט געשיט אַ ביסל זאַלץ אין די אַרבע־כּנפֿות פֿונעם קינד. ווען אַ ציגײַנער איז אַרויס פֿון שטוב האָט מען געוואָרפֿן זאַלץ, דאָס מזל זאָל נישט געשטערט ווערן.
אין אַנדערע מינהגים האָט דאָס זאַלץ אַן אַנדער אויסטײַטש. ס׳איז געווען אַ מינהג, אַז אויב מע וואַרפֿט זאַלץ אין אַ ווינקל, וווּ מע וועט עס נישט אַוועקקערן, וועט מען ווערן אָרעם. אין ענגלאַנד און האָלאַנד (ספֿרדישע ייִדן) האָט מען געגלייבט, אַז אויב מע שיט זאַלץ אויס, וועט דאָס ברענגען אַ שלעכט מזל. אין שודטס בוך פֿון „ייִדישע מערקווירדיקייטן“ [מאָדנע זאַכן] פֿונעם אָנהייב 18טן יאָרהונדערט, שרײַבט ער, אַז אַ ייִדישע פֿרוי פֿון דײַטשלאַנד האָט אים געעצהט אויפֿצוהענגען זאַלץ מיט ברויט אויף די העלדזער פֿון זײַנע קינדער, אַוועקצוטרײַבן דעם עין־הרע.
דער פּראָפֿעסאָר פֿון רעליגיע, טעאָדאָר גאַסטער, דער זון פֿונעם חשובֿן פֿאָלקלאָריסט הרבֿ משה גאַסטער, האָט ליב צו פֿאַרגלײַכן ייִדישע מינהגים מיט נישט־ייִדישע; צי ער טרײַבט איבער די פֿאַרגלײַכונגען מיט אַנדערע קולטורן איז אַ קשיא, אָבער אינטערעסאַנט, פֿון דעסטוועגן, זענען זײַנע שטודיעס. די טעג פֿון עומר פֿאַרגלײַכט ער אָן אַ „להבֿדיל“, צו דעם קריסטלעכן „לענט“ — די זעקס וואָכן פֿאַר פּאַסכע, ווען די קריסטן פֿאַסטן אָדער זענען מוותּר אַנדערע פֿאַרגעניגנס.
לויט גאַסטערן דאַרף מען באַטראַכטן ל״ג־בעומר ווי אַ פֿרילינגדיקן מײַ־פֿעסטיוואַל. ער שרײַבט, אַז דאָס שיסן פֿײַל־און־בויגנס איז געווען פֿאַרשפּרייט אין אייראָפּע דעם 1טן מײַ, ווײַל די נאַכט פֿריִער איז געווען „וואַלפּורגיס־נאַכט“ — „דער שבת פֿון די מכשפֿות“. די פֿײַלן האָבן אַוועקגעטריבן די בייזע רוחות. ל״ג־בעומר פֿלעגן די ייִדישע קינדער אויך גיין אויפֿן בית־עולם, נישט נאָר אין וואַלד, און גאַסטער באַטאָנט, אַז דאָס טאַנצן און פֿרייען זיך אויפֿן בית־עולם איז אויך פֿאָרגעקומען דעם ערשטן מײַ צווישן די פּויערים.
אין אַ זאַמלונג ייִדישע מעשׂיות פֿון אַראַבישע לענדער, רעדאַקטירט פֿון דן בן־עמוס, געפֿינט זיך אַ מעשׂה, דערציילט פֿון יוסף זיוו, וועגן די ייִדן פֿונעם טוניזישן אינדזל דזשערבאַ און די ניסים פֿון ל״ג־בעומר. בײַ זיי איז געווען אַ מינהג אָנצוצינדן אַ גרויסע מנורה און זי טראָגן מיט גרויס שׂימחה פֿון דער ייִדישער געגנט צו דער גרויסער סינאַגאָגע “אַל־גאַריבאַ”. די נאַכט האָט מען אָנגערופֿן „די נאַכט פֿון דער מנורה“, און מע האָט געזונגען, געשפּילט און רעציטירט פּאָעמעס מיט גרויס פֿרייד, גייענדיק אין גאַס.
איין יאָר האָט אַ גרופּע שׂונאי־ישׂראל באַשלאָסן, אַז מע טאָר נישט דערלאָזן, אַז די ייִדן זאָלן אַזוי זיך משׂמח זײַן. די באַנדע האָט געקליבן געווער — מעסער, העק, שטעקנס — און בדעה געהאַט צו באַפֿאַלן די פֿריילעכע ייִדן און זיי צעטרײַבן. אַלע אין דער גרופּע האָבן מסכּים געווען. אָבער אין דער נאַכט פֿונעם יום־טובֿ האָט מיט אַ מאָל אַ שטראַל ליכט אַ שײַן געטאָן פֿון דער מנורה און זיי פֿאַרבלענדט די אויגן. „דער גאָט פֿון די ייִדן איז געקומען אונדז אומברענגען, אַנטלויפֿט!“ — האָט דער פֿירער אויסגעשריגן, אָבער בלינדערהייט האָבן זיי נישט געזען וווּ צו לויפֿן.
ווען זיי האָבן סוף־כּל־סוף ווידער אָנגעהויבן זען, האָבן זיי זיך געפֿונען אין מיטן פֿון די טאַנצנדיקע, זינגענדיקע ייִדן. קיין ברירה האָבן זיי נישט געהאַט און געמוזט מיטטאַנצן און מיטזינגען ביז דער סינאַגאָגע. „און אין יעדן דור דערציילט מען וועגן דעם נס פֿון דעם ליכט, און וועגן דעם נס פֿון דער מנורה אין דער נאַכט פֿון ל״ג־בעומר. זאָלן אַלע אינטריגעס פֿון אונדזערע שׂונאים אָפּגעשאַפֿן ווערן, און גאָט זאָל אונדז ראַטעווען פֿון אַלע פֿײַנט.“
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