[LAST UPDATE: 9 AUG. 2024]
OPINION | YIDDISH | GREEN HOUSE | LAST JEWISH PARTISAN FORT
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Those of the founders of the Vilnius Summer Program in Yiddish, twenty-six years ago, in July 1998, who are still around and active will today wish to extend the heartiest of welcomes and the best of wishes and godspeed to all the participants of this summer’s mini-revival (two weeks rather than four, no university credit options, but with every perspective of equaling and surpassing the original conception in the years ahead). The new course has issued its program of studies (see the 1998 program for some perspective). The instructors are the well known Yiddish teachers Alec Eliezer Burko, Dov-Ber Boris Kerler, Yuri Vedenyapin, and Anna Verschik. All were at one time or another students of the original course’s founder, underlying the venerable Vilna tradition of chains of learning over the years. In the case of revived Yiddish studies in Vilnius, an early catalyst was the Oxford-Vilnius agreement of 1991 that enabled Lithuanian students to study Yiddish and Judaic studies at Oxford University in the 1990s.
