A Yiddish World Remembered

Your Playlist:

Description

Brimming with firsthand accounts, archival films and photographs, and a powerful current of traditional klezmer and cantorial music, this program examines the Yiddish culture and society that grew out of the Jewish diaspora in Eastern Europe. Viewers are shown glimpses of daily life in the shtetl, a type of village found across the Pale of Settlement-one that may have lacked running water and electricity and suffered from poverty, overcrowding, and anti-Semitism, but one which was also a close-knit and joyous place. The film explores many aspects of that nearly vanished way of life-the fascinating Yiddish language; traditional clothing; education in the cheder, or school house; the rabbis and rebbes who often led Yiddish communities; and the powerful Jewish movements of Hasidism, Bundism, and Zionism.