In Weimar, a festival preserves Yiddish culture while reinventing it
In Weimar, Germany, where the streets once echoed with the notes and ideas of Bach, Liszt and Goethe, another European musical tradition has been reverberating for more than a quarter-century: Yiddish. The annual Yiddish Summer Weimar…
The annual Yiddish Summer Weimar festival, held in Weimar, Germany, has been celebrating Yiddish culture for over 25 years. The event, which began in 1998, aims to showcase Yiddish language, music, and culture to a diverse audience, both Jewish and non-Jewish, young and old, religious and secular.
Alan Bern, the founder and artistic director of the festival, emphasized that the goal was to present Yiddish culture as alive and not entirely destroyed by the Holocaust. Before 1939, Yiddish was spoken by more than 11 million people worldwide, including the majority of Europe's Jews.
The language, which originated in the 10th century when Ashkenazi Jewish communities migrated from the Rhineland to Eastern Europe, has a rich history of literature, music, and thought. However, the majority of this cultural wealth was lost during World War II. Despite this, the Yiddish Summer Weimar festival has managed to keep the tradition alive, attracting hundreds of musicians, students, and scholars each year.
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