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Israeli drama film ‘Concerned Citizen’ tackles gentrification and race issues in Tel Aviv
(JTA) — The Israeli satirical drama film “Concerned Citizen” opens with the sacrosanct rituals of a bourgeois Tel Aviv life: a robot vacuum slides gracefully across the floor; lush house plants are watered; vegetables are blended into green juice. The score from the Bellini opera “Norma” plays in the background.
Then a car alarm rudely interrupts the utopia.
It only gets worse from here for Ben and Raz, a progressive Israeli gay couple (played by actors Shlomi Bertonov and Ariel Wolf, who are also a couple in real life) living in a pristine renovated apartment in a gentrifying neighborhood in south Tel Aviv. When Ben, a landscape architect, plants a tree on their block, his seemingly innocent desire to improve the neighborhood quickly goes awry, and a series of events forces him to face his own repressed prejudices and hypocrisy.
With the tension of a thriller, “Concerned Citizen,” the second feature film by Israeli writer-director Idan Haguel, tackles the universal themes of privilege and multicultural tension in gentrifying cities, using the hyper-specific lens of Neve Sha’anan — the south Tel Aviv neighborhood that’s home to many of the country’s foreign workers and asylum seekers, as well as the city’s notoriously rundown (but culturally vibrant) Central Bus Station.
After making its world premiere last year at the famed Berlin International Film Festival, the movie debuts in select U.S. theaters on Friday and will also be available to rent on Amazon and Apple TV+.
Ben and Raz’s apartment, a hot commodity in one of the world’s most expensive cities, is the axis around which much of the drama revolves. In one scene, a French-Jewish woman looks into buying the apartment sight unseen. Their neighbors include both the extremely vulnerable and the privileged: immigrants from Eritrea in one apartment, and a writer plotting his move to Berlin with his foreign wife in another.
Idan Haguel spoke with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency about the film and his personal connections to it. After losing his suitcase, Haguel chatted on his phone from a cafe in Berlin before heading to New York for the film’s American release.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
JTA: Tell me a little about yourself and how you became a filmmaker.
IH: I was born in the suburban city Rishon LeTsiyon and I always didn’t know what to do with my life. After the army I decided to go to film school. I wanted to be a scriptwriter, to do comedies. I discovered filmmaking, directing, and I gradually fell in love with that part. Then after school, I became a journalist because I couldn’t make a film — it was very difficult for me to get into that world. When my journalism career ended abruptly by the closing of the magazine, I decided that it’s now or never. I made my first feature film, that was a film called “Inertia.” That film is based on childhood memories of my grandparents. My grandparents were immigrants from Lebanon, Romania and Thessaloniki in Greece.
“Concerned Citizen” is partially about immigration. Why was it important to you to focus on the immigrant experience?
I was drawn into the irony, and, some may say, hypocrisy of living in a country that historically was formed by the narrative of [the Jew] being the immigrant of the world, not accepted into other countries, that in some ways still holding that grudge against countries that weren’t receptive to the immigrant Jew and pushed immigrants out. Of course, there is the horror story of Germany and the Holocaust and that’s the extreme end of mistreating “the other.” So living in a country formed by immigrants, [contrasted with] the way we behave to immigrants who are not part of the ethos of the Jewish immigrant narrative — I was drawn into that irony, although it wasn’t an intellectual process. It was more based on the experience of living in that neighborhood in south Tel Aviv, being marinated in the dilemmas and the daily complexity of living in Neve Sha’anan as a bourgeois, middle class person. After a few years I wanted to comment on that. I wanted to be brutally honest with myself and about myself. So my daily life and the life of my neighbors and friends became the material with which I wrote this fictional movie.
And you shot the film in your old apartment!
That was the mindfuck of the whole production, because I made the story close to me but I left a distance. I used my experience but I created these characters who are very close but very different. I shot the therapy scenes in my therapist’s clinic. I shot the building scenes in my building on my street. Everything became very, very close and it was really an “Alice in Wonderland” experience. Looking into a mirror and everything is morphing and making you look different and look differently at yourself and your life.
Can you talk about the south Tel Aviv neighborhood where the film is set, Neve Sha’anan?
It’s the outskirts of the center of Tel Aviv. It was always an immigrant neighborhood. But it changed over the years, it became working immigrants. In the 90s, there were the Romanian immigrants, and then it was Chinese immigrants who came to work in Israel. And over the last 15 years it has become immigrants from Africa, combined with older people who have lived there years and new people who are the more gentrifiers of the neighborhood, artists and gay people and those who are more economically stable. So now the neighborhood is comprised of sex workers, immigrants, junkies, dealers, and gay people. It’s a mix, but the prices have gone low, and people who didn’t have enough money to buy property in the city center started buying there. So the neighborhood has this tension of people who want to live a more bourgeois life, but they’re in the middle of the neighborhood with people who don’t have rights, who are immigrants, who don’t know if tomorrow the government will kick them out. People from all over the world. But it’s become a haven for investors and the neighborhood is in the middle of being gentrified and changed.
So it’s a very interesting setting to live in and to make a film in. It’s very dense. It’s one of the less homogenic and more diverse areas in Israel. Israel prides itself on the diversity of Jewish people coming from Arab countries, coming from Europe. But they’re all Jewish and they share a common mentality and they’re all citizens of Israel. Neve Sha’anan is more diverse – it’s people from India, China, Eritrea, Sudan, the Ivory Coast. I feel it’s a missed opportunity by Israeli society that instead of accepting these people legally and into our society, they are trying to hold back and fight against it. It’s also very ironic that Israel is becoming a state that aspires to have a government like this. It’s mind-boggling. It’s like, we learned nothing from history and our own history. It’s like people don’t want to connect dots. They just want to see the cruel history that they experienced as the Jewish people and feel like it was something personal that happened to them, and like they cannot be the victimizers at all.
You’ve said that this film is very much about the idea of who’s the victim and who’s the victimizer.
When you raise yourself and your children on the narrative of being a victim and perpetuating historical trauma it’s very hard to notice other people’s traumas, and the fact that you are creating traumas for other people. Because you’re constantly in trauma and you’re always dealing with your own trauma and you’re always the victim and you’re the center of the world, but you are not the center of the world. I think it should change. But no one cares what I think! Sometimes I don’t care about what I think.
What was the casting process like?
The casting process was through meeting people and going to plays. [I turned to] the Holot theater company to cast the Eritrean community in Israel. It was cast mainly by meeting actors from the group, having conversations with them. Basically they wanted to participate in the film and I was very lucky about that. They’re a group that used to be based in Holot outside of a temporary incarceration open prison for immigrants who don’t have permits to stay in Israel. They put them in an open prison in the desert close to the Negev.
There’s an interesting scene between the French-Jewish woman (played by Flora Bloch) who is trying to move to Israel and Ben that I thought was a very revealing moment about the ways that Jewishness is expressed when Jews are a minority in the country versus when they are the majority in the country. The French woman is concerned by France’s antisemitism and wants to move to Israel, while Ben is tortured by the complexities of living as a privileged Jewish Israeli person. Can you say something about what that scene meant to you?
One of the things I’m proud about this film is that I feel like it deals with subjects which are not easy subjects to address. But I think we managed to create a balance between comedy and drama that I’m very proud of. I think it allows the film to be self explanatory. It can reveal its deep themes and make you think, in an entertaining way. Again, it’s about irony. It’s about hypocrisy. It’s about human nature. Knowing how to experience your own point of view, and being unable to be in another person’s point of view. It’s human nature, and it’s ever-fascinating to me.
And it also happens to me a lot of times with the fact that I can be in my own shoes and identify my own narrative so much but it’s hard for me to even experience a person who is experiencing the same thing as me but in a different language in different settings. But the resemblance is there so it’s very ironic. And I think that scene is about that.
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The post Israeli drama film ‘Concerned Citizen’ tackles gentrification and race issues in Tel Aviv appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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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.
The post Why France celebrated a Jewish avenger of Ukrainian pogroms appeared first on The Forward.
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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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