russian

VILNIUS UNIVERSITY

The Vilnius

Yiddish Educator

Seminar

6—20 May 2005

An Advanced Intensive Program Conducted Entirely IN YIDDISH

for

professional educators

and

teachers-in-training

A program sponsored by

THE FRIENDS OF THE VILNIUS YIDDISH INSTITUTE

with generous support for a

series of FULL TUITION SCHOLARSHIPS

from

THE RIGHTEOUS PERSONS FOUNDATION

The Yiddish Educator Seminar

Interest in serious study of Yiddish language, literature and culture continues to grow internationally. At the same time, the “secondary Holocaust effect” takes its toll daily, as the last living masters who came to intellectual maturity before 1939 — writers, teachers, scholars, editors, performers, cultural organizers — reach the end of their days, often defiantly working for the cause of their beloved heritage deep into old age.

Yiddish is nowadays taught at many levels, particularly in university credit programs, and in adult education and community settings. There is also some progress in the introduction of the language and its literature at the elementary and secondary level in Hebrew days schools and other Jewish educational establishments. The academic and pedagogical interest is growing. Motives range from the desire to reconnect to one’s roots to the need for competence for researching language and literature in Jewish, Slavic, Baltic, Germanic and other fields.

In the realm of secular Yiddish studies, there are very few university educators who have also published books in Yiddish and have taught advanced courses in Yiddish (rather than just “about Yiddish”). The Educator Seminar brings together four of them. They are Ms. Miriam Hoffman of Columbia University in New York; Professor Dovid Katz of Vilnius University; Professor Dov-Ber Kerler of the University of Indiana at Bloomington; Professor Yitskhok Niborski of the Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations in Paris.

Each of the four instructors will concentrate on a specific aspect in which he or she is an acknowledged specialist. All four have taught Yiddish in university contexts for decades, and their cumulative expertise in Yiddish education means that issues that come up in teaching Yiddish in the twenty-first century will be dealt with extensively and openly, with full respect to the various competing approaches in today’s Yiddish educational market of ideas.

All participants will be taught by all four instructors. In addition to classroom work, there will be daily written homework. The program is conducted entirely in Yiddish.

To apply for a place in the program, applicants are asked to write a letter of application in their own words, explaining their current employment, as well as plans for introduction or enhancement of their Yiddish language teaching in the framework of their appointments. Please enclose a current curriculum vitae, and arrange for two letters of recommendation, one of which should be from a dean, director, principal or other recognized academic supervisor from the applicant’s current institution.

The tuition fee is US $1800, which entitles applicants to full participation in the program, copies of all study materials, and appropriate university credit upon successful completion of the academic requirements. Note that notices of credit from the university provide details of hours, instructors and grades; it is up to participants’ home deans to decide on the local apportioning of credit. Participants are responsible for their travel, lodging and meals; program staff can assist with information on the available options and logistical support. For information please contact project coordinator Olga Bliumenzon at: yiddisheducator@yahoo.com.

A number of partial and full tuition scholarships are available, thanks to the Righteous Persons Foundation and other donors. Only professional teachers are eligible for scholarship assistance. Please write to the coordinator for more information.

The Instructors

Ms. Miriam Hoffman was born in Lodz, Poland in 1936 and came to America at the end of 1949. She has been Lecturer in Yiddish at Columbia University in New York for over a decade, and is a well-known Yiddish writer. A dozen of her Yiddish plays have been staged. Her Lider fun Gan-Eydn (Songs of Paradise) was produced by the late Joseph Papp at the New York Shakespeare Festival. A number of her Yiddish plays toured Regensburg, Munich, Warsaw, Amsterdam and Zurich. She has published several children's books, and is best known for her weekly column in New York's Yiddish Forward. Over two thousand articles have appeared to date. Ms. Hoffman, a graduate of the Jewish Teacher's Seminary of New York (B.A. in pedagogy), also holds a B.A. from the University of Miami, and a Masters Degree in
Yiddish Studies from Columbia University. She has taught intensive
Yiddish courses at Oxford and Vilnius Universities, at Yivo in New York, and at U.C.L.A. Her translation into Yiddish of Neil Simon's Sunshine Boys earned her an Emmy Award. As a child in the D.P. Camp in Ulm, Germany, she collected some eighty songs in four languages — Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian, and Polish. The album is now housed at the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. She has compiled three university-level textbooks for the study of Yiddish which are in the final stages of preparation.

Professor Dovid Katz is professor of Yiddish language, literature and culture at Vilnius University in Lithuania. Born in New York City in 1956, he moved to Britain in 1978 to pursue his doctoral studies in Yiddish linguistics, and went on to establish Yiddish studies at Oxford University, where he taught for eighteen years. After a stint at Yale, he settled in Vilnius to take up a new chair, and to pursue his in-situ expeditions that would seek out and record elderly native Yiddish speakers among the last generation of Holocaust survivors in Eastern Europe. His dozens of published studies on Yiddish include a book in Yiddish on current Yiddish usage, style and language standardization. He founded and edited the Oxford Yiddish series, entirely in Yiddish, in the 1990s, and has won a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Manger Prize in Yiddish Literature. He has also published three collections of fiction in Yiddish. His Words on Fire: The Unifinished Story of Yiddish (Basic Books, New York) will appear in September 2004.

Professor Dov-Ber Kerler was born in Moscow in 1958. His father was the Soviet dissident poet Josef Kerler who led the campaign for freedom of literature and the right to emigrate. After the family emigrated to Jerusalem in 1971, Dov-Ber Kerler became immersed in Yiddish studies, completing his BA in the subject at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He went on to doctoral studies at Oxford University where he taught for sixteen years, before taking up the Dr. Alice Field Cohn Chair in Yiddish studies at Indiana University at Bloomington in 2001. His landmark Origins of Modern Literary Yiddish was published by Oxford University Press in 1999. He edited the Winter Studies in Yiddish series in the 1990s, and has also published several volumes of his own Yiddish poetry. He has been leading expeditions to seek out and record Yiddish speakers in Ukraine since 2002. He is editor-in-chief of the prestigious Yiddish periodical Yerusholaymer almanakh.

Professor Yitskhok Niborski was born in Buenos Aires in 1947 to Polish-Jewish parents. He graduated from the Yiddish-Hebrew Teachers’ Seminary in 1963, and after a stint in Jerusalem returned to become a full-time Yiddish educator in the Argentine capital. In 1979 he settled in Paris, where he went on to build a major European center of Yiddish culture and study. He has taught Yiddish at the University of Paris VII, the Medem Library, and at intensive Yiddish courses in Brussels, New York, Oxford, and Vilnius. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on Yiddish master Aaron Tsaytlin. Professor Niborski is widely known for his dictionaries. He has coauthored a Yiddish-Spanish dictionary (1979), a Yiddish-French dictionary (2002), and a dictionary of the Hebrew and Aramaic elements in Yiddish (1997) which has quickly become an international standard. He is also an accomplished Yiddish author whose Fun a pustn fas (Voice from an Empty Barrel), comprising selections from his poetry and prose over three decades, appeared in Paris in 1996. Professor Niborski was one of the founders of the Society for the Study of Yiddish (best known from its Yiddish acronym, GEFYL), which pioneered mass-participation events in Europe as a stimulus to serious study of the language. He is the key intellectual and pedagogical figure in the new Paris Yiddish Center that was established in 2002.

THE VILNIUS YIDDISH INSTITUTE

at VILNIUS UNIVERSITY

Founder of the Institute and Director of the Summer Program

Mr. Mendy Cahan

Executive Director

Dr. Sharunas Liekis

Director of Research

Professor Dovid Katz

Academic Consultant

Professor Alfredas Bumblauskas

President of the Friends of the Vilnius Yiddish Institute

Dr. Richard Maullin

Manager

Ms. Loreta Paukshtyte

Summer Course Coordinator

Ms. Laima Gumuliauskaite

Project Coordinator

Ms. Olga Bliumenzon

STAFF OF THE YIDDISH EDUCATOR SEMINAR

Administrative Director

Professor Sharunas Liekis

Academic Director

Professor Dovid Katz

Project Coordinator

Ms. Olga Bliumenzon

Project Consultant

Dr. Richard Maullin

The Vilnius Yiddish Institute

Vilnius University

Universiteto 7

Vilnius 2734, Lithuania

Educator Seminar email: yiddisheducator@yahoo.com

Vilnius Yiddish Institute email: institute@yiddishvilnius.com

Summer Course email: info@yiddishvilnius.com

www.yiddishvilnius.com

telephone: +3705 268-7187

fax: +3705 268-7186