Back to the Shtetl

Ilya Shneyveys and Alex Parke will join us this evening for Shabbat

Dear friends, 

The moment of silence observed during Yom Hashoah ceremonies has a way of cutting through the noise around the topic of Holocaust remembrance, and into the purpose of the day. Yesterday it caught me in a protest against an Israeli government minister, who is the best living example of what Israeli philosopher, Yishayahu Leibovitz z”l called Judeo-Nazis. As we waited for Ben Gvir to arrive, we were invited into silence to remember the six million. In that silence I remembered not just the dead, but the vibrant Yiddish culture the vast majority of them came from. 

Yiddish survived the war, as New Yorkers know well from their unique Yiddish-peppered vocabulary. In Israel it didn’t fare as well as it did here, so most of the Yiddish I know, I picked up in New York. I remember when during springtime rehearsals for my first professional acting gig, a big production of The Passion Play in Union City, NJ, Erv, an old Jewish actor sent me home saying “Hob a zissen peysach!” I stared blankly at him. Looking surprised, he continued, “It means Happy Passover.” 

Erv’s little lesson showed me how deep my ignorance was about my ancestral Ashkenazi heritage. I could suddenly see how disconnected I was from the generations before me. Both sides of my family, from my parents back at least ten generations spoke Yiddish. But I grew up in a place that saw Yiddish as the old language of weakness, something associated more than anything else with shame. The Israeli ethos of strength and newness rooted out any traces it found of Yiddish.  

So, this week of Yom Hashoah, in a time when the memory of those murdered in Europe is being so cynically exploited, I am going back to the culture they lived. This evening’s Shabbat we will welcome the Klezmer duo of Ilya Shneyveys (singing and accordion) and Alex Parke (clarinet), who will bring us back to the shtetls and neighborhoods of Lublin, Krakow, Odesa and Minsk, to get back in touch with the living language and music of our ancestors. 

Ilya and Alex, who play regularly with the great Klezmer musicians of our fair city (including our own Frank London) will join Yonatan in some Shabbat prayers, lead us in some Yiddish tunes you may know, and get that Pintele Yid inside us dancing to the rhythms and melodies our great grandparents knew so well. 

I hope to see you there.

Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha