World
Weimar’s Yiddish festival set to draw thousands
Event aims to explore the range of cultures across Israel and the diaspora
July 13, 2017 16:21
Event aims to explore the range of cultures across Israel and the diaspora
July 13, 2017 16:21The city of Weimar in Germany was a hotbed of literature, music and the visual arts - and home to some of the great names of the arts world - before the Nazi takeover in 1933.
Yiddish Summer Weimar, a music and arts festival, has been reintroducing Jewish culture back to the city for two decades.
This summer, the festival - subtitled ‘The Other Israel: “Seeing Unseen Diasporas’ - aims to encourage artistic dialogue between Israel’s various ethnic communities and explore the diversity of cultures across the Jewish diaspora.
The festival begins on Saturday and runs to August 15.
Among the performers are the Arab-Jewish Choir from Jaffa, who will collaborate with Weimar's Schola Cantorum in Alan Bern's musical arrangement of Poems for Children by Polish Jewish author Kadya Molodowsky.
The newly formed Arab-Jewish Caravan Orchestra from Haifa will join forces with European players, to perform European, Arabic and Jewish works.
Brighton’s renowned Polina Shepherd is running Yiddish music workshops. She said: “It brings together top international faculty and participants from all over the world, a fantastic community of people of all ages, professions, ethnic backgrounds and political views.
“Apart from the highest level of studies, I really like YSM's openness to discussion. It opens doors to discussion about Yiddish- and Jewish, in general- culture, welcomes sometimes challenging and forward thinking opinions and it also presents a fantastic range of performances to illustrate that our culture has moved into the 21st century and is always fresh, new, and up to date”.
The festival’s International Artists Consultant, Helene Kamioner, whose mother tongue is Yiddish, explained that the Weimar festival was not just another Yiddish music event: “The outstanding factor of this particular event is its effort to revive, research, develop, advance and celebrate a culture and a language which produced the greatest artists, writers, thinkers and musicians the world has to offer.”
