Even with its peeling white paint, Cabin 5 feels like home to Golda Shore. For two decades, the 96-year-old has left Florida each summer for a “Trip to Yiddishland,” a weeklong immersion in Yiddish language and culture.
Ms. Shore is one of 230 people, ages six months to 100, participating in this summer’s retreat about 70 miles north of New York City. Early risers can stretch into sunrise with “yoga and kvetch,” while the more dramatic attendees can dive into workshops on Yiddish theater and song. There are also six levels of Yiddish-language classes, from beginner to advanced.
“I look forward to it every year. I wouldn’t dream of missing it. I’ve been told I’m the first to register. Each time I think, ‘This will be my last,’ so when I return, I’m delighted,” Ms. Shore says.
Why We Wrote This
The number of Yiddish speakers has declined dramatically since World War II. An annual camp in New York State is part of the effort to preserve it – engaging people who have spoken it for years, and a new generation that is just starting to learn.
The daughter of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, Ms. Shore grew up in a Yiddish speaking household. “When I shopped with my mother, everyone spoke Yiddish – the deli, the appetizing shop, the kosher butcher. It was like a little shtetl.” For one week each summer, Ms. Shore is once again surrounded by the rhythms of her first language.
Now in its 20th year, Yiddishland is run by the Workers Circle, or Der Arbeter Ring. Founded 125 years ago by Yiddish-speaking immigrants, the organization has long blended labor activism, mutual aid, and cultural preservation. Today, Yiddishland does more than keep the language alive after the Holocaust. It sparks a new generation of enthusiasts.
“Everyone here is celebrating a culture and drawing on community. It’s about joy and resilience. It’s not just a culture being preserved; we’re living our Yiddish,” Ann Toback, CEO of the Workers Circle says, standing under a copse of white pine trees.
Before World War II, an estimated 11 million people spoke Yiddish worldwide. Today, the number has dropped to about 250,000, though it remains widely spoken in ultra-Orthodox communities such as Monsey and Williamsburg in New York.
In recent years, however, Yiddish has begun to emerge in the cultural mainstream. A 2018 Yiddish-language production of “Fiddler on the Roof” earned critical acclaim and in 2020 a Yiddish translation of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” was released.
“Consider yourself recruited”
Inside the airy dining hall, laminated covers of Workers Circle magazines are tacked onto a wall. Each is a testament to the organization’s work in various social justice issues, including the labor movement and education. In another corner, musicians in a klezmer music workshop chase a melody. In another, a dozen or so attendees pore over Yiddish war poetry.
Ms. Toback couldn’t stop raving about the previous night’s concert, in which twentysomethings were singing and dancing hand-in-hand with octogenarians and nonagenarians.
“Often, different generations don’t want to hear from each other. Not so here; here the intergenerational mingling is exactly what you’d wish for. You can see the wonderful sharing that’s going on; the way everyone comes together,” Ms. Toback says.
This year’s program also includes a course on immigration in American Yiddish literature, taught by cultural fellow Yasha Giner.
“Yiddish writing is full of stories about assimilation, resistance, and the immigrant experience,” Mr. Giner says.
The Workers Circle built its Sylvan Lake retreat in the 1920s. It gave Jewish immigrants a chance to escape the crowded, sweltering streets of Manhattan’s Lower East Side and breathe fresh air, build community, and ease into American life.
Although the majority of Yiddishland attendees are seniors, younger people join each year. Some are children of longtime participants. Others are taking part in the retreat’s relatively new young adult cohort program. In three years, the cohort, whose members must be between the ages of 18 and 29 and in school or working, has grown from three students to 38.
Rachel Landau, a Harvard doctoral student in Slavic languages, is attending for the first time.
Exploring Yiddish also helped her uncover more of her own family’s history. She recently discovered that her great-grandfather, a dentist, was a reporter for Der Tog, a Yiddish newspaper published in New York City.
One of the week’s highlights for Ms. Landau was sitting outside with other peers reading and translating a book of Yiddish poetry.
Ms. Landau, who attended a Hebrew day school growing up and was active in Hillel, a Jewish campus organization, during her undergraduate studies at Brown University, says Yiddishland has shown her a new way to connect with Jewish culture.
“It’s shown me other ways to engage with culture and community. I am already hatching plans to bring more Yiddish engagement to Harvard,” she says, adding that she’s been sending photos of the week to friends with the message, “Consider yourself recruited.”
“I can speak a bissel, a little”
It was during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic that Ryan Deitsch of Parkland, Florida, found himself drawn to Yiddish.
A co-founder of March for Our Lives and longtime member of the Workers Circle College Network, Mr. Deitsch stumbled on some VHS tapes of his family. In one, his mother was interviewing his grandmother.
“She was telling her life story and she says a few bits of Yiddish. I learned they had been members of Arbeter Ring. This bit of lost family history is partly what pulled me in,” Mr. Deitsch says, joining Ms. Landau and several other students in a gazebo several yards from the lake.
While he originally came to Yiddishland for the language, he’s stayed for the culture and community.
“Everyone told me ‘Yiddish is dead, don’t waste your time on it,’” Mr. Deitsch recounts.
Now, after taking several intensive classes, “I can speak a bissel, a little,” he says.
Likewise Elliot Oppenheim, a history major at Northwestern University, says studying Yiddish offered him a chance to connect more deeply with his roots.
“Yiddish was my great-grandfather’s first language. He died when I was 16, and he would be so happy that I am carrying on the legacy,” Mr. Oppenheim says.
This keen interest in Yiddish from a younger generation electrifies Kolya Borodulin, the Workers Circle’s director of Yiddish programming.
Mr. Borodulin grew up in Birobidzhan, Russia’s Jewish Autonomous region, where Yiddish is an official language. Yet, he learned almost nothing about the language until adulthood. Then in 1988, when he was almost 30, he began studying it. Three months later, he was teaching Yiddish to other adults.
“Now I can’t stop learning or teaching. I got turned on to it and I can’t turn it off. It makes me curious, it inspires me,” says Mr. Borodulin, who has authored children’s books and educational materials.
Beyond the classes and workshops, participants swim, paddle canoes, play tennis or basketball, or prepare for the much anticipated Thursday night cabaret.
But the heart of Yiddishland is the same thing that keeps Ms. Shore coming back year after year.
“You’re with mishpacha,” Ms. Shore says, using the Yiddish word for family.
